Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

制作者的日程，管理者的日程

“…the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day."
"…仅仅是意识到一项安排有时会让人整天担忧。”

– Charles Dickens – 查尔斯·狄更斯

July 2009 2009 年 7 月

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.
程序员不喜欢开会的一个原因是，他们的日程安排与其他人不同。会议对他们来说成本更高。

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
有两种类型的日程安排，我称之为管理者的日程和创造者的日程。管理者的日程是为老板准备的。它体现在传统的预约簿中，每天被划分为一个小时的时间段。如果你需要的话，可以为一个任务预留几个小时，但默认情况下，你每小时都会更换正在做的事情。

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.
当你以这种方式使用时间时，与某人会面只是一个实际问题。在你的日程中找到一个空闲的时间段，预订它，然后你就完成了。

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
最有影响力的人都在管理者的日程安排中。这是指挥的日程。但还有另一种使用时间的方式，这在制作东西的人中很常见，比如程序员和作家。他们通常倾向于用半天或更长时间为单位来使用时间。用小时为单位是无法写好或编程的。那几乎不够开始。

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.
当你按照制作者的日程安排工作时，会议是一场灾难。一个会议可能会毁掉整个下午，因为它被分成两个太小而无法做任何难事的部分。此外，你还得记得去开会。这对管理者来说不是问题。总有事情会在下一个小时发生；唯一的问题是是什么。但当制作者日程安排的人有会议时，他们必须考虑这件事。

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.
对于按照制作者日程安排的人来说，开会就像抛出异常。它不仅仅导致你从一项任务切换到另一项任务；它改变了你工作的模式。

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
我发现有时一次会议就能影响一整天。一次会议通常至少会浪费半天时间，因为它会打断上午或下午的工作。但除此之外，有时还会有连锁反应。如果我知道下午会被打断，我早上就不太可能开始一项雄心勃勃的工作。我知道这可能听起来有些敏感，但如果你是创造者，想想自己的情况。难道你一想到能有一整天完全自由地工作，没有任何预约，精神就不会振奋吗？那么，这意味着当你没有这样的机会时，你的精神相应地也会低落。而雄心勃勃的项目在定义上就接近你能力的极限。一点小小的士气低落就足以让它们夭折。

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.
每种类型的日程安排单独使用都很好。问题出现在它们相遇时。由于大多数有权势的人使用管理者的日程安排，如果他们想要的话，他们处于能够让每个人都按照他们的频率共振的位置。但更聪明的人会克制自己，如果他们知道他们的一些员工需要长时间连续工作的话。

Our case is an unusual one. Nearly all investors, including all VCs I know, operate on the manager’s schedule. But Y Combinator runs on the maker’s schedule. Rtm and Trevor and I do because we always have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she’s gotten into sync with us.
我们的情况很不寻常。几乎所有投资者，包括我所知道的所有的风险投资家，都按照管理者的时间表运作。但 Y Combinator 是按照创造者的时间表运作的。Rtm、Trevor 和我一直如此，而且 Jessica 也基本如此，因为她已经和我们同步了。

I wouldn’t be surprised if there start to be more companies like us. I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or at least postpone, turning into managers, just as a few decades ago they started to be able to resist switching from jeans to suits.
如果开始出现更多像我们这样的公司，我并不感到意外。我猜测，创始人将越来越能够抵制，或者至少推迟，转变为管理者，就像几十年前他们开始抵制从牛仔裤转变为西装一样。

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 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.
我们是如何在制作者的时间表上为这么多初创公司提供建议的？通过在制作者的时间表中使用经典的模拟管理者时间表的方法：办公时间。每周几次，我会留出一块时间来会见我们投资的创始人。这些时间块通常在我工作日的结束阶段，我编写了一个报名程序，确保在特定办公时间内所有的预约都集中在最后。由于这些会议安排在我一天工作的最后阶段，所以它们永远不会打断我的工作。（除非他们的工作时间也和我一样结束，那么会议可能会打断他们，但既然他们安排了会议，那对他们来说一定值得。）在繁忙时期，办公时间有时会变得足够长，以至于压缩了整天的时间，但它们永远不会打断整天的时间。

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 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, 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.
在我们 90 年代创业的时候，我又发展出一种划分时间的技巧。我每天从晚餐后编程到凌晨 3 点左右，因为晚上没有人会打扰我。然后我会睡到大约 11 点，之后进入工作状态，直到晚餐时间，我称之为“处理业务”。我从未从这种角度思考过，但实际上我每天都有两个工作日，一个按管理者的时间表，一个按创造者的时间表。

When you’re operating on the manager’s schedule you can do something you’d never want to do on the maker’s: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.
当你按管理者的时间表工作时，你可以做一些在创造者时间表上永远不想做的事情：你可以安排一些投机性的会议。你可以与人会面，只是为了互相了解。如果你日程表上有空档，为什么不呢？也许最终你会发现你们可以在某些方面互相帮助。

Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They’re effectively free if you’re on the manager’s schedule. They’re so common that there’s distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to “grab coffee,” for example.
硅谷的商界人士（以及整个世界）经常安排投机性的会议。如果你按管理者的时间表工作，这些会议实际上是无成本的。它们如此普遍，以至于有专门的语言来提议这些会议：比如说你想“喝杯咖啡”。

Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you’re on the maker’s schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager’s schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day’s work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.
如果你遵循制作者的日程安排，投机性会议会非常昂贵。这让我们陷入某种困境。每个人都假设，像其他投资者一样，我们遵循管理者的日程安排。因此，他们会介绍他们认为我们应该会面的人，或者发邮件提议我们喝杯咖啡。此时我们有两个选择，但都不好：我们可以与他们见面，从而损失半天的工作；或者我们可以尝试避免与他们见面，可能会冒犯他们。

Till recently we weren’t clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I’ve realized what’s going on, perhaps there’s a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem.
直到最近，我们对自己的问题根源并不清楚。我们只是认为我们不得不要么打乱日程安排，要么冒犯他人。但现在我意识到发生了什么，或许有一个第三种选择：写一些东西来解释两种类型的日程安排。也许最终，如果管理者日程和制作者日程之间的冲突开始被更广泛地理解，这个问题就会变得不那么严重。

Those of us on the maker’s schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager’s schedule is that they understand the cost.
那些遵循制作者日程的人愿意妥协。我们知道必须有一些会议。我们向那些遵循管理者日程的人提出的唯一要求是理解成本。

Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
感谢 Sam Altman、Trevor Blackwell、Paul Buchheit、Jessica Livingston 和 Robert Morris 审阅此书的草稿。