#although then again. haruki murakami wrote a novel on his first try. so what do i know?

[greenerteacups]

Long ask ahead! Sorry in advance for my rambling!

I’m a huge fan of Lionheart! (Latest update got me furious btw, your Umbridge characterization is amazing; i need. Revenge. the woman is vile)

my long ask today is on the topic of writing fanfics, or beginning to; i’ve been a fan of hp for a longish (?) time (i am currently in my first year of college, so since elementary school) and i want to start dipping my toes in writing fanfics, esp dramione. problem is, i have all these grand plans and ideas but i struggle with motivation and perfectionism — especially perfectionism. this has been a long standing problem on my end, but if every line is not to “my standard, or “perfect”, i feel deeply dissatisfied and i find it impossible to move on. i’m also very flighty — i get distracted easily, and lose momentum. i have so many ideas that i want to try out that i end up having a plethora of projects, none with a resolution. do you deal with this? what are your biggest struggles with writing? how do you move past them?

i also would like to say that i know that you’ve stated that writing is all for fun, but if you were to get published, i would 100% buy! i really hope you’re doing something in the creative industry, because really, your writing is amazing.

Hey, what up! Thanks so much!

If you'll permit a bit of tough love: it sounds like you don't really like writing those projects. There are a lot of reasons someone might leave a project, but when it comes to free hobby writing, if you've abandoned something, Occam's Razor, it's because you don't want to do it anymore.

And BTW: that's fine. You're not legally obligated to finish stuff. You're not under contract. If you're a hobby writer, your sole obligation is to have fun and please yourself. I've written tons of stories without middles or endings; I've got dozens of 3 or 4-chapter would-be longfics sitting on my drive, with absolutely no intention to finish them. I'm totally fine with that. This is something I do for fun. Why would I bully myself about not being sufficiently "productive" in something I'm doing for fun?

But it sounds like maybe you want to finish a fic, and/or see finishing as a prerequisite to publishing, in which case: you need to keep writing a project after you're bored or dissatisfied with it. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that you should go back through your drive, find the project you like least, and force yourself to write 1-2 pages on it. Because you are never going to be as pleased with what you've written as you are with the fake perfect story in your head. Even the worst, shittiest, misspelled, poorly plotted story that exists is better than the fake perfect story, because it exists, and is real writing, rather than just being the concept of something that is well-written. Abandoning a story because it doesn't live up to the hype is like refusing to eat because what's on the plate isn't as good as the Platonic concept of a chocolate cake. Like, of course it's not, dude! You didn't imagine it as having flaws!

It seems like you know that, which suggests that you need to force yourself to write something that you don't want to. So try shorter stuff! Writing short stories is a great way to learn the tools of the trade while giving yourself less time to burn out. Make it easy on yourself. And like, remember to forgive yourself. There are some things you can bully your brain into doing. Sincere and authentic art is not one of them.

[straycatboogie]

2023/07/11 English

BGM: Vangelis - Chariots Of Fire

Today I worked early. After that work, I went to the library. Although I thought I would borrow a Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa's poem collection, but forgot that I had already reserved Haruki Murakami's book "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running". The librarian told me about that, and I felt ashamed... but this can happen in an autistic life often. I borrowed that Haruki's book and tried to enjoyed reading until the time we have the English conversation class at 7 pm (I usually enjoy reading by using this kind of "brank" time). It seems that this book is a memoir by Haruki Murakami, who is a person who has tried to train himself by running. He tries to look back at his past days, and also explains how he has built himself/his attitude until now. TBH I don't train my body physically every day. All I do is just to walk toward a convenience store, so the people who train themselves in such a severe way seem like the ones from another world/dimension. By reading that, I thought I could learn how he had spent his life by writing and running. He keeps on his stoic/positive attitude every day, and I am attracted by that positive vibe of him. Should I train myself physically? Yes, it seems I can't keep on longer, everyday...

Reading this essays/memoir, I notice that he has chosen keeping on writing in his pace, obeying his own rules not competing/battling with others. I am impressed by his strong will, tough style. He shows how uncool he is. For me, He is a great writer/critic with smart mind/brain too. But he keeps on his modest attitude and explains he has trained himself actually by touching various things. He has experienced a lot of things in his life, and trained himself steadily. Like the episode of the days he had worked as a "master" of a jazz bar (it sounds a legendary episode). When he was in his 20s, he was just an owner of a jazz cafe. But one day, when he was watching a baseball game, he thought of writing a novel by himself. That was his debut novel "Hear The Wind Sing". After finishing it, he sent that to a publisher. It was praised well and at last published... and that was the beginning of his career. Ah, when I read this episode I wished strongly that I wanted to live the day like him. Someday "the day" will come, and my dream will come true... I waited for the day so long with drinking heavily. But nothing changed. I spent my days in vain... Sorry, I already wrote this yesterday.

Indeed, I am just an uncool old dude. An indoor, introspective, introvert person who likes enjoying music and reading my favorite books in my bedroom. I never have any will, any diligent attitude like Haruki. We shouldn't expect that any masterpiece could be completed one day instantly, immediately (at least, it must never be able to happen in "my life"). I understand that my favorite writers have been trying to train themselves everyday seriously/steadily, waiting for "the day" will come. Yes, in their life "the day" comes, and their talents explode... But is it possible to happen in "my life"? Although I tried to write another sonnet like yesterday, but... after writing it I felt satisfied with that certainly. I even felt upper/happier... But, by reading it with calm mind again, I felt deeply ashamed because it was like "a love letter we write at midnight (next day's morning, we must feel ashamed by what we wrote)". Oh my, this must be crap... just a graffiti. However, I just started the trial of writing/creating poems. I should train my body physically even though I won't run. I walk for while? In a park with Vangelis's music... His great soundtrack as "Blade Runner".

And the evening I went to the English conversation class. There, we talked about the hobbies we have. What kind of hobbies do we have/enjoy? I confessed my hobby. Reading and listening to. When I was a high school student, I met Haruki Murakami's book for the first time. From that event, I have enjoyed his books at various chances in my life... and other people also explain their hobbies. "What kind of hobbies can we enjoy reasonably (without costing money)?", "Your hobbies affect/interfere your life?", and "What hobby is the most/least popular one in Japan"? We talked those topics too. I couldn't say that kind of opinion I have. Reading? It is not cool for us to accept as a hobby... I would even pretend to be a cool person. We had teenage students in the class. They said to me "I just know Haruki Murakami's name, never read his books. Is it good?". Ah, what a generation gap (but I won't diss them. When I was a teenager, how could I have learned the modern Japanese literature deeply?). Staying to be myself is cool. After the class, I slept soon because I was tired. When will this rainy season end? Is Kyusyu area alright?

Untitled (for a trial of studying... or "Serial Experiments Again")

Once I thought my death for resting That idea was like the songs of Sting But trust me, that wasn't cause I was arresting I just had believe that my life was a wasting

But now I'm feeling I'm getting strong ... NO! I'm still weak, I'm simply being wrong This poem is for me a kind of protest song For what? I don't know. I wanna ring a gong

A lot of "legendary bangars" in my mind, behind This poem is a trial of making mine, I've signed I wish you would get alive, and stay still kind

A sonnet is a style I've never enjoyed for a while Can I offer this for you to read? Your mind would drive? Yes, I'm naive. But I can't keep this within my file

[limejuicer1862]

On Fiction Wombwell Rainbow Interview

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger. The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these fiction writers you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Andrew David Barker

was born in Derby, England in 1975. He is a writer and filmmaker. He is the author of The Electric and the novella Dead Leaves. As a filmmaker, he wrote and directed the cult, post-apocalyptic indie feature, A Reckoning,in 2011, and has recently made the short films, Two Old Boys and Shining Tor. He lives in Warwickshire with his wife and daughter, trying to be a grown up.

andrewdavidbarker.com

twitter.com/ADBarker

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write fiction?

I’ve just always loved stories, and I’ve always had ideas for stories. I had a pretty poor education though and I was still pretty much learning to read and write when I left school. I spent my 20s educating myself and novels for very much part of that education. I didn’t read a novel voluntarily until the summer I left school. That was Clifford D. Simak’s Out of their Minds, a fantasy novel from 1970. This led me to outline my own fantasy, adventure novel and me and my friend Ben Waldram spent the next five years or so trying to write it. It was set in the afterlife and the project grew large and unwieldy and was certainly beyond my capabilities to finish it. I learned a lot working on that project though. Plus, I was always distracted by other creative pursuits. Filmmaking was, and sometimes probably still is, just as interesting to me as writing novels, so I was always trying to make films as well when I was younger. Me and my mates made our big hit when we were in college in 1993 – an anthology horror called Tales from Hell, which is about as good as you can imagine. Stephen King was a big influence early on. But I also read David Gemmell, and Clive Barker, and Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, which also had a big effect on me. I was interested in genre, but also interested in stories that existed in worlds similar to the one I grew up in. Certainly judging by my first book, The Electric, the balance between the two has never left me. That book deals with movies and the supernatural, but also exists in the world that I grew up in.

2. Who introduced you to fiction?

Early on it was my mum. She liked horror fiction and tales of the supernatural. My love of a good ghost story comes from her. She read James Herbert and had books by Aleister Crowley on the shelf. She still loves a good ghost story. My friend Ben, who I mentioned earlier, also introduced me to fiction, and without his influence and excitement for reading and writing stories, I probably wouldn’t have become a writer.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older writers?

I’m not really. I suppose I was when I was younger. I never really thought I’d ever be published. I was conscious of my lack of education and was always frightened someone cleverer than me would pull my writing apart. I used to think that because I was from a working class background I had no right becoming a novelist. I thought of writing novels as an elitist thing – something only the privileged get to do – and it most cases it very much is, but I forged on anyway. I am intimidated by the brilliance of say, Cormac McCarthy or Dickens, but I’ve learned to live with all that now. You can never be that good, so why worry about it? I no longer care about any of that stuff anymore because I’m just doing my own thing. My background and experiences and the way I see the world make me who I am as a writer – they give me my identity, my voice, for want of a better word, and I wouldn’t change any of that now.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

Like many writers I still have a day job. I’ve always had to have another income. I feel that if you are able, in this day in age, to get up every morning and afford to write all day, every day and still pay all the bills, then you are in a very privileged position indeed. No art form really pays anymore, unless you are really flying. So I work and I have to carve out time every day to write. I have a family and a job and mostly I don’t get started until gone eight o’clock at night. After a day of work and being a parent and a husband there’s not much juice left in the tank by eight, but I have to discipline myself to do it. Some nights it works, some nights it doesn’t. I’m working on a novel at the moment so my routine is to work Sunday to Thursday in the evenings and also very early on Saturday mornings. I give myself Friday and Saturday nights off. That’s it. If I wasn’t working I would write in the mornings all week as that’s my preferred time to write, but I have to just do what I can in the time I’ve got.

5. What motivates you to write?

The excitement of a good story idea and being with the characters I create. It’s that simple. I don’t write for money because as I’ve said making money out of this stuff is impossible, certainly on my level. So I do it because I love it. I feel good once I’ve written, feel great in fact. I think writing makes me a better person, certainly a saner person. I can handle life better when I’m writing. I’ve attempted a lot of other creative pursuits. I’ve directed films and played in a rock band, and although I did love those things, they did not give me the same sense of satisfaction as writing a good page does. I remember when I finished writing The Electric, my first novel; I could hardly believe that I’d done it. At long last I’d written a novel. That feeling was like nothing else.

6. What is your work ethic?

To try and finish everything I start. After Dead Leaves came out in 2015 I attempted and abandoned two novels in the space of a year and a half. This ground me to a halt. It knocked my confidence and sent into a kind of limbo for a while. 2018 has been the year I was determined to turn things around. I wrote and directed two short films, Two Old Boys and Shining Tor, and wrote the screenplays for two other shorts directed by other people, One, Nine, Three and Endling, and I wrote a small collection of ghost stories, which I hope to get published in 2019. Making these shorts, actually completing the work and having them screened in front of an audience was thrilling and energising. More than that though, I’ve been successful in getting an Arts Council grant to write a novel, which is just incredible because I’ve never had any help or backing before. So I’m back at work on a novel, writing as fast as I can, which isn’t very fast truth be told, but I am doing it and I am going to finish it. Finishing a project is the key to everything.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

Stephen King is still an influence. He’s a master storyteller. He has an identity that just draws you in and his characters are great. I always remember the characters more than the monsters. 8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why? Magnus Mills is my favourite British novelist; Paul Auster is my favourite American novelist. Although that could all change next week. They both write about characters and worlds I understand. I also greatly admire Haruki Murakami for his balance of the fantasque and surreal and the deeply personal. I’m always looking for someone new to inspire me. Books are very personal things, much like music. It has to connect. I don’t see one thing as being high art and other being low art. The Great Gatsby speaks to me as much as The Shining. They’re both great books that speak of the dread, honesty and darkness of the human heart. Magnus Mills speaks to me because I know blokes like the ones he writes about; I’ve grown up with them, worked with them, and he’s one of the very few working class writers out there that is genuinely from the world he writes about. So there is a real honesty about his work. Honesty and heart are the things I look for, I suppose.

9. Why do you write?

To make sense of the world and to make sense of myself.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?” Just write. Take to the time to develop yourself and only submit or put something out there when you are a hundred percent sure of it. That said, I’m still learning. I’ve only ever been published through small presses. I’ve never had an agent or even had an agent interested in me. I hope to change that, but I’m not pushing it. The work itself is what I’m interested in. If you’re in it for fame and money and power, then forget it. It has to be a pure love, otherwise, what’s the point? You might get fame and money – there are a few lucky ones that fall through the net – but more than likely you won’t, and you’ve got to be fine with that. Keep writing, keep submitting, keep getting better.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment

Well I feel like a novelist again. It’s taken a while. I’ve been making short films for the most of this year and writing short stories, but now I’ve cleared the decks of all that stuff and am only working on the novel until it’s done, which will be in the spring, all being well. My novella, Dead Leaves, has just been reissued in a new paperback through Black Shuck Books and I’m hoping to work with them again at some point. Moves are also being made on the production of an audiobook for The Electric, something I’ve been wanting to get done for years, so I’m very excited about that. Hopefully that’ll be out early 2019. As for the novel, it’s a departure in that the first two books are in first person and were told in the timeframe of only a couple of days, whereas this one is in third person and covers a decade in the lives of the protagonists. There are movies, of course – they seem to be my thing – and working class characters struggling to stay afloat, but there is also love, and a lot of heart. I’m trying to dig deep on this one. We’ll see.

On Fiction Wombwell Rainbow Interview Andrew David Barker On Fiction Wombwell Rainbow Interview I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

[thirteenthanda]

Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You

Consider the daily schedule of famed novelist Haruki Murakami. When he’s working on a novel, he starts his days at 4 am and writes for five or six continuous hours. Once the writing is done, he spends his afternoons running or swimming, and his evenings, reading or listening to music before a 9 pm bedtime. Murakami is known for his strict adherence to this schedule.

In contrast, consider the schedule of entrepreneur, speaker, and writer Gary Vaynerchuk. He describes his day (which begins at 6 am) as being broken into tiny slots, mostly comprising meetings which can be as short as three minutes. He makes calls in between meetings. During the moments between meetings and calls, he posts on just about every social network in existence and records short segments of video or speech. In short, his day, for the most part, involves managing, organizing, and instructing other people, making decisions, planning, and advising.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The numerous articles we have all read about the schedules and routines of successful people like these often miss the point. Getting up at 4 am does not make someone an acclaimed novelist, any more than splitting the day into 15-minute segments makes someone an influential entrepreneur.

What we can learn from reading about the schedules of people we admire is not what time to set our alarms or how many cups of coffee to drink, but that different types of work require different types of schedules. The two wildly different workdays of Murakami and Vaynerchuk illustrate the concept of maker and manager schedules.

Paul Graham of Y Combinator first described this concept in a 2009 essay. From Graham’s distinction between makers and managers, we can learn that doing creative work or overseeing other people does not necessitate certain habits or routines. It requires consideration of the way we structure our time.

What’s the Difference?

A manager’s day is, as a rule, sliced up into tiny slots, each with a specific purpose decided in advance. Many of those slots are used for meetings, calls, or emails. The manager’s schedule may be planned for them by a secretary or assistant.

Managers spend a lot of time “putting out fires” and doing reactive work. An important call or email comes in, so it gets answered. An employee makes a mistake or needs advice, so the manager races to sort it out. To focus on one task for a substantial block of time, managers need to make an effort to prevent other people from distracting them.

Managers don’t necessarily need the capacity for deep focus — they primarily need the ability to make fast, smart decisions. In a three-minute meeting, they have the potential to generate (or destroy) enormous value through their decisions and expertise.

A maker’s schedule is different. It is made up of long blocks of time reserved for focusing on particular tasks, or the entire day might be devoted to one activity. Breaking their day up into slots of a few minutes each would be the equivalent of doing nothing.

A maker could be the stereotypical reclusive novelist, locked away in a cabin in the woods with a typewriter, no internet, and a bottle of whiskey to hand. Or they could be a Red Bull–drinking Silicon Valley software developer working in an open-plan office with their headphones on. Although interdisciplinary knowledge is valuable, makers do not always need a wide circle of competence. They need to do one thing well and can leave the rest to the managers.

Meetings are pricey for makers, restricting the time available for their real work, so they avoid them, batch them together, or schedule them at times of day when their energy levels are low. As Paul Graham writes:

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

It makes sense. The two work styles could not be more different.

A manager’s job is to, well, manage other people and systems. The point is that their job revolves around organizing other people and making decisions. As Andrew Grove writes in High Output Management:

…a big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus, I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

A maker’s job is to create some form of tangible value. Makers work alone or under a manager, although they might have people working with them. “Maker” is a very broad category. A maker could be a writer, artist, software developer, carpenter, chef, biohacker, web designer, or anyone else who designs, creates, serves, and thinks.

Making anything significant requires time — lots of it — and having the right kind of schedule can help. Take a look at the quintessential maker schedule of the prolific (to say the least) writer Isaac Asimov, as described in his memoir:

I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day of the week, including holidays. I don't take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I'm on vacation. (And even when I'm in the hospital.)

In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store [where he worked as a child]. Of course, I'm not waiting on customers; I'm not taking money and making change; I'm not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do — but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance.

The Intersection Between Makers and Managers

It is far from unusual for a person’s job to involve both maker and manager duties. Elon Musk is one example. His oft-analyzed schedule involves a great deal of managing as the head of multiple major companies, but he also spends an estimated 80% of his time on designing and engineering. How does he achieve this? Judging from interviews, Musk is adept at switching between the two schedules, planning his day in five-minute slots during the managerial times and avoiding calls or emails during the maker times.

The important point to note is that people who successfully combine both schedules do so by making a clear distinction, setting boundaries for those around them, and adjusting their environment in accordance. They don’t design for an hour, have meetings for an hour, then return to designing, and so on. In his role as an investor and adviser to startups, Paul Graham sets boundaries between his two types of work:

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures [that] all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.

Likewise, during his time working on his own startup, Graham figured out how to partition his day and get both categories of work done without sacrificing his sanity:

When we were working on our own startup, back in the ’90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then, I'd sleep till about 11am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.

Murakami also combined making and managing during his early days as a novelist. As with many other makers, his creative work began as a side project while he held another job. Murakami ran a jazz club. In a 2008 New Yorker profile, Murakami described having a schedule similar to Graham’s in his days running a startup. He spent his days overseeing the jazz club — doing paperwork, organizing staff, keeping track of the inventory, and so on. When the club closed after midnight, Murakami started writing and continued until he was exhausted. After reaching a tipping pointwith his success as a writer, Murakami made the switch from combining maker and manager schedules to focusing on the former.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport describes the schedule of another person who combines both roles, Wharton professor (and our podcast guest) Adam Grant.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available to his students. (This method seems to work, as Grant is currently the highest-rated teacher at Wharton and the winner of multiple teaching awards.)

During the fall semester, Grant is in manager mode and has meetings with students. For someone in a teaching role, a maker schedule would be impossible. Teachers need to be able to help and advise their students. In the spring and summer, Grant switches to a maker schedule to focus on his research. He avoids distractions by being — at least, in his mind — out of his office.

Within a semester dedicated to research, he alternates between periods where his door is open …, and periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.) During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he’ll often put an out-of-office auto-responder on his e-mail so correspondents will know not to expect a response. “It sometimes confuses my colleagues,” he told me. “They say, ‘You’re not out of office, I see you in your office right now!’” But to Grant, it’s important to enforce strict isolation until he completes the task at hand.

“A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.”

— Seth Godin, The Dip

The Value of Defining Your Schedule

We all know the benefits of a solid routine — it helps us to work smarter, look after our health, plan the trajectory of our days, achieve goals, and so on. That has all been discussed a million times and doubtless will be discussed a million more. But how often do we think about how our days are actually broken up, about how we choose (or are forced) to segment them? If you consider yourself a maker, do you succeed in structuring your day around long blocks of focused work, or does it get chopped up into little slices that other people can grab? If you regard yourself as a manager, are you available for the people who need your time? Are those meetings serving a purpose and getting high-leverage work done, or are you just trying to fill up an appointment book? If you do both types of work, how do you draw a line between them and communicate that boundary to others?

Cal Newport writes:

We spend much of our days on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time. This is a problem. It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, “What makes the most sense right now?”

There are two key reasons that the distinction between maker and manager schedules matters for each of us and the people we work with.

First, defining the type of schedule we need is more important than worrying about task management systems or daily habits. If we try to do maker work on a manager schedule or managerial work on a maker schedule, we will run into problems.

Second, we need to be aware of which schedule the people around us are on so we can be considerate and let them get their best work done.

We shouldn’t think of either type of work as superior, as the two are interdependent. Managers would be useless without makers and vice versa. It’s the clash which can be problematic. Paul Graham notes that some managers damage their employees’ productivity when they fail to recognize the distinction between the types of schedules. Managers who do recognize the distinction will be ahead of the game. As Graham writes:

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

Makers generally avoid meetings and similar time-based commitments that don’t have a direct impact on their immediate work. A 30-minute meeting does not just take up half an hour of an afternoon. It bisects the day, creating serious problems. Let’s say that a computer programmer has a meeting planned at 2 pm. When they start working in the morning, they know they have to stop later and are prevented from achieving full immersion in the current project. As 2 pm rolls around, they have to pause whatever they are doing — even if they are at a crucial stage — and head to the meeting. Once it finishes and they escape back to their real work, they experience attention residue and the switching costs of moving between tasks. It takes them a while — say, 15 to 20 minutes — to reach their prior state of focus. Taking that into account, the meeting has just devoured at least an hour of their time. If it runs over or if people want to chat afterwards, the effect is even greater. And what if they have another meeting planned at 4 pm? That leaves them with perhaps an hour to work, during which they keep an eye on the clock to avoid being late.

Software entrepreneur Ray Ozzie has a specific technique for handling potential interruptions — the four-hour rule. When he’s working on a product, he never starts unless he has at least four uninterrupted hours to focus on it. Fractured blocks of time, he discovered, result in more bugs, which later require fixing.

In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain describes an experiment to figure out the characteristics of superior programmers:

…more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical.

When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you’d think would matter—such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work—had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with ten years’ experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below—even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in “zero-defect” work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn’t worked together. That’s because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

A common argument makers hear from people on a different schedule is that they should “just take a break for this!” — “this” being a meeting, call, coffee break, and so on. But a distinction exists between time spent not doing their immediate work and time spent taking a break.

Pausing to drink some water, stretch, or get fresh air is the type of break that recharges makers and helps them focus better when they get back to work. Pausing to hear about a coworker’s marital problems or the company’s predictions for the next quarter has the opposite effect. A break and time spent not working are very different. One fosters focus, the other snaps it.

Remember Arnold Bennett's words: “You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use … is a matter of the highest urgency.”

by Farnam Street