Patent attorney's schedule

Have you ever heard of the manager's and maker's schedule?

I have recently come across a very interesting piece about two types of schedule, written by Paul Graham. You can read the article here.

It is worth reading his article, but the short summary is that the manager's schedule follows the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. Most powerful people are on this schedule. People like programmers and writers follow a different schedule, called the maker's schedule. They 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. If you operate like this, a single phone call can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. It is quite obvious, but still so interesting.

"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."

A meeting does not cause any problems for someone on the manager's schedule. In that schedule, there's always something different coming every hour.

Although Paul Graham mentions artists and creators, it is quite relevant for us, patent attorneys as well. We have a lot of emails, consultations, phone calls with clients, but still have to be able to set aside long chunks of uninterrupted time in order to work on drafting claims, office action, opposition, etc. It just does not make sense for me to start these assignments when I only have 30 minutes or an hour. As the article says: "Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet." And for a patent attorney, they will definitely meet. So, the question is how we handle it. 

I quickly realized that on my most effective days - when I was able to resist checking the emails too often - I followed the maker's schedule. Now that I know this has a name and why it works, I will definitely plan my days to follow the maker's schedule more often. 

However, I also noticed that I am often on a "manager's schedule" on Mondays when I have so many smaller tasks to catch up on (emails, EP validations, etc.) that I do not have time to start working on a major task. Then, during the rest of the week I can follow a schedule that is more similar to the "maker's schedule".

Disclaimer: I know that not everyone is able to freely arrange their schedule. I also think that we cannot be 100% effective every single day. There are days when our work is interrupted by meetings (or anything else) and it is OK. However, I think that this topic is very interesting and worth to discuss.