Erin Colbert

Manager Schedule, Meet My Maker Schedule

I love Seth Godin. He has a pretty amazing job. He gets paid to be thought provoking, but he’s damn good at it. Sometimes when I read his blog I feel like I’m reading my horoscope or a fortune cookie. You know - that feeling you get when you read something that perfectly addresses a thought you’ve had, but never really put it into words until that moment? That’s what happened to me when I read his post (and Paul Graham’s post) today.

Online marketing as a discipline is both strategic and tactical. I, like I’m sure many other marketers experience, have to split my time between strategy and tactics - meetings and execution. Lately I’ve found the switching costs getting higher and higher, primarily because I’ve been getting pulled into more and more meetings at work. While it’s always fun to brainstorm new ideas and work on new projects, it leaves me with broken chunks of the day to follow through on those projects.

I realize that I’m caught between the manager and maker’s schedule.

While this gives me plenty of ideas on how to rework my own schedule, I’m curious about how this affects an organization in general. I know I’m not the only one getting caught in the middle. In Paul’s article he says,

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.

What happens when multiple people at an organization are caught between the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule? What happens to creativity? To productivity? How many manager’s are calculating the true cost of meetings?