It was with no small amount of sadness that I read this article about manager's time and maker's time. Short version: managers budget their time in little blocks. Makers budget them in large blocks. (I'd add "fireman time" to this list, in which you don't get to budget anything at all, and must respond immediately to demands on your time -- on-call doctors, tech support, and our office manager are people who essentially operate on fireman time.)

I think the author is largely right -- when I'm writing I try to budget whole days for writing (like today, oops), and I do a lot of my writing work at home on weekends and before/after "work".

What makes me sad is that it's becoming more and more clear that I have to spend more and more of my time on manager time schedule rather than maker time schedule. Not even budgeting writing days will work. In other words, I will have to spend less and less time making in the next few years.

I'm reminded of one of my ex-coworkers at Shaw lamenting that he had spent all day crafting 5 carefully-worded emails instead of thinking about trading. I thought at the time that meant that he really did love the nuts-and-bolts of the work of trading. (And he was very good at both his manager time and maker time, and is now one of the small handful of people making major decisions at the top there.) I suppose that's the price of success, but it's a costly one. As frustrated as I get with writing sometimes, I think I'll miss my maker time.