Scheduling of work falls into two broad categories: Makers and Managers. Most of us are either managing people and projects or making something, like documents, apps or other creative things that require sustained focus.

Our attempt to balance our managing time wit...

• Managers can work in time blocks of 30 or 60 minutes, scheduling meetings or sending emails.
• Makers need almost half a day to get down and create something, requiring an uninterrupted focus mode that is nearly impossible.

What complicates matters is that many...

None of us can get creative in short 15-minute bursts of work sandwiched between a mandatory meeting and a sales team call. It is also a myth that people work for 8 to 10 hours a day.

Most people are productive in sporadic periods of time, like 15 minutes, followed by an interruption, then...

A way to organize our schedule is to split the days in our week into two categories, marking our calendar as:

1. Manager Days: Only focusing on pairing, syncing, answering, meeting and doing managing and follow up work.
2. Maker Days: Only focusin...

• If splitting of weekdays between managing and making is strictly followed, it makes our day focus clear and we can happily ignore emails and other stuff on our ‘maker’ days.
• Others have clear expectations and the seemingly urgent requests can easily be filtered out.
• If you...

• Not everyone can commit full days of deep focus work, or even manage the whole day.
• We can refer to our body clocks, energy levels and working style to create a day calendar splitting blocks of hours in a way that we have half a day, or about three to four hours of...

The real problem according to experts, is making the switch between managing and making, due to the fact that our brain does not immediately obey us and is stuck on the work that was happening earlier, something known as attention residue.

We can take the help of certain rituals a...

1. Use a time-tracking app and review the kind of activities that are done during the day and how much time the activities take.
2. Categorize those activities as ‘maker’ or ‘manager’.
3. Find the daily patterns and use that information to schedule your ‘maker time’.
4. Keep ...