Makers, Don't Let Yourself Be Forced into the 'Manager Schedule'
The core message is true: Constant interruptions are bad, dedicated periods of focus are good, managers should help foster sustained focus for their employees. I think we can all agree on that.<p>However, this isn&#x27;t an unbiased article: This company wants to sell you a SaaS product that they think will reduce interruptions. They have an incentive to make you think that the manager&#x27;s schedule is as terrible as possible, because they want you to sign up for their SaaS tool. In my experience, each additional SaaS tool piled on to developers, no matter how well-intentioned, just introduces more distractions and overhead. Reading toward the end suggests some possibly helpful tools, but I&#x27;m not seeing anything that can&#x27;t be accomplished with some common sense and existing tools.<p>This blog post has unhealthy amounts of exaggeration and hyperbole. Consider the &quot;Actual Schedule&quot; chart in this article that only shows blocks of &quot;Ruined Morning&quot; and &quot;Ruined Afternoon&quot;. Or the claim that a single standup meeting can blow an entire afternoon because it interrupts the afternoon flow. The study they linked doesn&#x27;t even support such excessive problems with disruption.<p>These exaggerated narratives are seductive for two reasons: First, it&#x27;s true that interruptions come at a cost to focus on other tasks. Second, it gives us an easy out to blame everyone else for our lack of productivity or focus. Did I waste my afternoon on Twitter and HN instead of getting my work done? Well, I read an article that says it&#x27;s my manager&#x27;s fault for that 30 minute scheduled meeting that I&#x27;ve known about for a week. It&#x27;s always tempting to blame someone else, especially when there&#x27;s a shred of truth to it. I&#x27;ll admit that I fell into this trap for a while when I was younger.<p>Having grown up on &quot;Maker&#x27;s schedule vs. manager&#x27;s schedule&quot; I was a die-hard believer that managers had it easy, while engineers got the short end of the stick due to all of those pesky distractions. When I switched to management, I was shocked to discover that I still needed periods of sustained focus and that I still had problems dealing with interruptions. The maker vs. manager distinction I had learned about didn&#x27;t really exist, but in the manager role I had no choice but to work around it. Once I stopped blaming everyone else for my poor ability to recover focus or get into flow states, I became much better at managing my own time.<p>I firmly believe that articles like this are counter-productive, because they send a message that poor time management and excessive time wasting are not your fault, and therefore not your responsibility. That mindset closes the door for any possibility of improvement, which is the opposite of what you want. Yes, it would be great in an ideal world if we could work for a week straight without interruptions, but that&#x27;s not reality. Instead, focus on skills to better manage your own time and plan around interruptions.<p>Practice responding to people with &quot;I&#x27;m in the middle of something right now, can we talk about this after our scheduled meeting in the afternoon?&quot; to coalesce your meetings together. Or statements like &quot;I&#x27;m happy to help, but I&#x27;m really busy right now. Can you write this up in an e-mail, cc my manager, and we&#x27;ll look at it in the morning?&quot; If your manager is to blame, broach the subject in a professional manner and politely ask if your manager can help batch your interruptions into a single daily conversation. Put it on the calendar if you must, but the important thing is to take charge of your time management.<p>Finally, put deliberate effort into getting back into a flow state after interruptions. If your first reaction after returning to your desk is to open up HN or Twitter, then you&#x27;re part of the problem. I&#x27;ve found that putting my headphones on and spending 10-20 seconds mentally retracing my steps before the interruption is very helpful.