"For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work."

A single meeting commonly blows at least half a day by breaking up a morning or afternoon. Worse, there's a cascading effect: if you know the afternoon is going to be broken up, you're less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. Ambitious projects live close to the limits of your capacity, and a small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule — it's the schedule of command — so they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency. The smarter ones restrain themselves when they know some people working for them need long chunks of time.

Y Combinator simulates the manager's schedule inside the maker's by using office hours: chunks of meeting time clustered at the end of the working day, so appointments compress the day but never interrupt it.

Running a 90s startup, Paul programmed from dinner till 3am when no one could interrupt him, slept till 11, then did "business stuff" until dinner. In effect he ran two workdays each day — one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.

Speculative meetings ("grab coffee") are effectively free on the manager's schedule but terribly costly on the maker's. This creates a bind: meet and lose half a day of work, or decline and probably offend the person.