In preparation for an internal strategy meeting this week, I reread a short essay that I recommend to anyone who has any control over his or her own work schedule or over the work schedules of others. It is an essay I have returned to several times and have gained new insights on each occasion. 
 

Quick summary—the standard business schedule is that of the manager. Every hour, there is a new activity or meeting and planning a new activity is as simple as finding the next available open hour in the calendar. Then there are people who make things, people who can spend entire days working on a single project and who need those extended periods of focus to attain true productivity. There are tremendous costs when these makers are shoehorned into a manager’s schedule.
 

When I worked at a large law firm, I was at the mercy of my bosses. If something needed to be done, then I did it on the partner’s schedule. This ruined several weekends, but it also took a toll during the workweek. Since billable hours are the key metric, though, all was well as my number of billables increased as a result of these interruptions. Then there were the weekly status meetings. Few things wreck a morning quite like those. I do my best work in the morning and now block off entire mornings where I don’t even check my email before lunch to progress on major projects. Not checking email was unfathomable in those days, but it was impossible to start a real project before the meetings since I knew I would have to stop, and the meetings were always midmorning. My hours of peak energy were thus spent giving a five minute verbal update that could have been conveyed in an email.
 

Now, there are two of us working together. I left BigLaw sooner than Bill, so I have had more time to detox from that mindset. Our scheduling practices, both individually and as a firm, are something we are still iterating. Some of our differences are personality-based and some stem from the type of projects we are completing. Scheduling in terms of weeks instead of days when possible helps as that mentality allows me to block off one or two mornings a week without impeding our busier meeting schedule or the increasing amount of production work we are doing. I don’t think we have found the proper balance yet, and the balance will shift over time. The benefit of this essay at this juncture is that its language helps us frame our scheduling discussions.
 

To read the essay for yourself, click HERE. If you do, my hope is that at a minimum you gain a better understanding of why certain people have very different work patterns than yourself. You may even want to experiment with your own schedule (to the extent you have the luxury of setting it) to determine whether blocking off half a day or a whole day for a single project helps you reach your larger strategic goals.