Maker's schedule, manager's schedule — and where salespeople fit
Paul Graham described two incompatible work schedules. Salespeople live in both at once — which is why neither quite works for them.
In 2009, investor and programmer Paul Graham wrote an essay that still circulates through companies: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule. The manager lives in one-hour slots — the day is a row of meetings and one more does no harm. The maker needs half-day blocks — a meeting in the middle of the afternoon doesn't break an hour, it breaks the whole afternoon, because thinking can't be paused and resumed like a task.
Salespeople are both — and therefore neither
Sales looks like a purely managerial profession: calls, meetings, reactions. But what separates the good from the average is the maker work between meetings — thinking through a quote, preparing for a negotiation, building a strategy for a key account. Most salespeople do it in the strips between calls — maker tasks in a manager's schedule, the worst possible mode. The result is quotes written at seven in the evening and preparation done “in the lift.”
Two schedules, one day
The solution isn't fewer meetings — it's to stop scattering them. Graham's logic leads to a simple arrangement: glue meetings and calls together into blocks (say, afternoons), and protect one maker block a day — two hours without calls for quotes and preparation. It sounds banal; the difference is that the block lives in the same calendar as the meetings and follows the same rules. You don't book a meeting into a maker block for the same reason you don't book it into another meeting.
The condition: the silence must be covered
A maker block survives only if you trust that nothing will escape in the meantime. That's why it needs a system that holds the dates and the enquiries and speaks up if something's on fire. Without it, the block is broken by your own nerves — every twenty minutes you “just check” whether something came in, and you're back in manager mode, just without the meetings.
What to take away
Look at next week in your calendar: where are the maker blocks? If you don't see any, you've found the reason quotes get written in the evenings.
The cover comes from reminders in Lemnio — silent during the block, and afterwards they bring you back to the names and dates. Start free.