“Graham embraced this insight and created a company culture at Y Combinator that now runs completely on a maker’s schedule. All meetings get clustered at the end of the day. To experience extraordinary results, be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon. Your goal is “ONE and done.” But if you don’t time block each day to do your ONE Thing, your ONE Thing won’t become a done thing.” – “The One Thing” by Gary Keller
I’ll share something from Deep Work as well, because I’ve been particularly distracted lately. Here he describes someone adjusting their environment to get those beautiful beautiful maker hours in:
A newfound devotee of deep work, he rented an apartment across the street from his office, allowing him to show up early in the morning before anyone else arrived and work without distraction. “On good days, I can get in four hours of focus before the first meeting,” he told me. “Then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon. And I do mean ‘focus’: no e-mail, no Hacker News [a website popular among tech types], just programming.” Deep Work by Cal Newport
You might not have the perfect environment or schedule for this, but it’s worth working toward.
That said, Polina Marinova recently wrote about the opposite: sometimes life is truly hectic and you just might need to learn to type with one hand for hours on end.
But here’s the shocking answer to the question above: I do have time to write because I make time to write. I work in 2- to 3-hour spurts and write one-handed on my phone in the middle of the night as I feed the baby. (Fun fact: This exact paragraph was written at 3:18 a.m.)
No matter how many times I come across this schedule advice, I check my phone first thing in the morning and don’t start making until maybe right before I’m supposed to sleep.
I’m writing this on the treadmill after a PM workout.
Trying to make it work.