创造者日程 & 管理者日程 - Paul Graham【英音中字】

比较喜欢优秀程序员的一些思考，尽管120%的纯技术博客都看不懂，但当他们从代码中跳出来，写一些与现实非常有共性的话题时，程序员往往能 给出一些带有他们独特魅力的思路和解决过程，简洁，高效，注重逻辑，清楚优先级，同时富有独创性，独一无二。


从某种意义上说，代码、绘画、木工、建筑、语言、影像等等具备创造性、同时也具备解决现实问题能力的手艺，都会为手艺人赋予一些独到的特质，这是在常规的非创造性工种中难见的。


而另一面，由于要代入自己大量的思考，这类手艺人往往不太喜欢太多打扰，但面对钱包和甲方的时候，又不得已放弃一些大块的时间，来听“字体大一点同时小一点”之类的话。


安心创作 和 车轮大会 总有扯不完的矛盾，直到有天我了解到，原来不同人使用着不同的日程，创造者用的是一套，而管理者则是另一套。


笔者 Paul Graham, 即《黑客与画家》作者，同时也是 Y Combinator 风险投资家。


https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html 手翻。


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创造者日程 & 管理者日程
来自 Paul Graham, 2009.7


码农不喜欢开会的原因之一，在于他们的日程与他人不同。对他们而言，开会简直要命。


这里我列出两种日程，即创造者日程与管理者日程。管理者日程是给老板准备的。他存在于一些典型的日程安排表中，并把每一天切割成按小时计的间隔。你可以把数个小时用于单项工作，但一般你每个小时都会做不同的事。


这样花时间，常常不过是为了与人会面。找个空出来的时间，预约，搞定。


大多数权利所有者都被计划在了管理者日程上。这个日程的主题是命令。但是，在创造者中（比如码农和画家）还有另一种广泛使用的日程。他们大多喜欢把半天作为一个基本单元。如果你按小时作为单元来安排，你很难画出或者码出好的东西：时间太短，以至于还不够热身(~。~)┍


当你在用创造者日程时，会议就成了大灾难。一个会议会把时间切割成两个片段，而每个片段又短到做什么都不能全情投入，于是乎，整个下午就废了。而且啊，你还得花心思记住要开这个会。这对于管理者日程上的人而言，并不是问题。下个小时总有事儿，唯一的问题就是“什么事儿”。但当创造者的日程中加了一个会，他们就得好好想想了。


对于用创造者日程的人，会议就是个节外的东西。这不仅仅要让他从一个项目切换到另一个，而且还会改变人的工作模式。


有时我发现，一个会议还能影响一整天。一个会通常通过切割时间的方式毁了半天。但此外，有时还有层叠效应。如果我知道下午要被割了，早上我也没什么斗志做什么大事。我知道，这听起来有点过于敏感，但倘若你是个创造者，想想自己吧。当你想到一整天都是自己的时间，没任何会议打扰，难道不会想想都激动？嗯，这也意味着，当你没有一整天属于自己的时间，你也会郁郁寡欢的。一般来说，这些让你特有抱负感的事都在你能力范围的边界。一丁点打击都有可能彻底毁了你的士气。


两种日程其实各自都挺好的，但问题往往就出现在二者碰撞时。因为最大的权力者使用管理者日程，他们的位置决定了，只要他想，大家都要按着他的节奏来。但是聪明人一旦知道为他们工作的人需要大量时间来投入，他们则会克制自己。


（介绍笔者自己的风险投资 Y Combinator的一些不同，他们用的创造者日程）


如果说越来越多公司会向我们看齐，我是不奇怪的。我怀疑在未来，创业者会越来越能克制自己，或者至少说延迟自己变成管理者的进度。也不过几十年前，他们才开始抵抗牛仔裤换西服的风潮。


我们是如何做到基于创造者日程来为初创公司提供咨询的呢？我们在创造者的大框架下，引入工时的概念来模拟管理者日程。每周我都会单独抽出一段时间来见见我们投资的人。这些都是我工作日的结尾时间，同时我写了个程序，确保所有的会议都集中在一起。由于他们是在我一天的结尾才来的，他们从来不会影响我。（除非他们一天的结束时间和我一样，这可能会影响他们，但既然他们安排了会，就说明这个会对他们还是有价值的。）在忙的时候，这个工时可能会加长并占用些其他时间，但他从来算不上打扰。


在90年代，我们埋头于我们自己的初创项目是，我用了另一个方法来分割时间。因为没人打扰我，我曾经会从晚饭后到凌晨3点间码程序。接着，我会睡到早上11点，然后再开始工作到晚餐时间。那时我从来没想过日程这个话题，但实际上每天我都有两个工作日了，在两种日程上各一个。


当用管理者日程工作时，你可以做一些创造者完全不想浪费时间做的事，比如投机性质的会议，或者只是社交而已。时间有多，为啥不用一用呢，说不定就能带谁飞一把。


在硅谷和全世界的商人，都总是有各种投机的会。一旦你在管理者日程上，他们总会找出时间。这能力太普遍了，以至于他们发明了个专门的词，比如“取个咖啡”。


但当你在创造者日程上时，投机会议真的糟心。因为它算是把我们束缚住了。每个人（比如投资人）都会这样假设，我们是用管理者日程来安排时间的。所以他们总是用“取个咖啡”的方法来把我们介绍给要见的人，或者发邮件给我们。这时我们有两种都不好的选择：和他们见面并扔掉半天的工作，或者避免见面，但这可能会冒犯别人。


直到最近我们才意识到了问题的根源所在。我们总是以为我们要不就得放下日程，要不就得冒犯人。但现在我们知道了第三种选项：向他人解释这两种日程。也许最终，越来越多的人理解了二者之间的矛盾，问题也就越来越小了。


创造者日程的人是愿意妥协的。我们也都知道，我们总是要有些会要参加。我们唯一想要那些管理者日程的人理解的是，这样做所要付出的代价。


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One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.