The Cost of Calendar Conformity

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Episode Transcript

Hi there, my name is Cameron Conaway, this is 3-Minute Reframe, and today we’re talking about Calendar Conformity.

On April 3, 1855, Charles Dickens wrote a letter to Maria Winters, in which he described the need for creative space as a writer:

“’It is only half an hour’—’It is only an afternoon’—’It is only an evening,’ people say to me over and over again; but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes—or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometime worry a whole day.”

If you are a creative person, you likely feel that quote in your bones.

In 2009, Paul Graham wrote an essay called “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” It articulated a tension I have navigated for fifteen years, straddling the line between a corporate people manager and a poet writing books like Malaria, Poems.

As Graham describes it: the Manager’s Schedule is the schedule of command. It’s embodied by the Outlook or Gmail calendar, cut into intervals. For a manager, a meeting is just a practical matter—you find an open slot, book it, and move on.

But the Maker’s Schedule is different. Writers, programmers, and designers often prefer to use time in units of half a day or more. You likely cannot write deep code or an important essay in a 30-minute block. You need a runway.

The conflict arises when organizations suffer from what I call Calendar Conformity.

This is the default assumption that everyone’s day should look like the manager’s—a grid of 30-minute blocks. It’s all the more ironic because many companies that shout about their innovation and creativity and how different they are… are still locked into the old default patterning of calendar conformity. When a manager imposes their schedule on a maker, it can be destructive.

A meeting at 3:00 PM doesn’t just consume that hour. It casts a shadow over the entire afternoon. It consumes cognitive energy just to remember it exists. I know that my most creative works benefited from those rare days where I could play with ideas until they became something or I was tired of them… rather than until the clock told me to stop.

In my role at Penn State, even a two-hour block of office hours in the middle of the day can disrupt my creative output for the blocks of time before and after it.

So, yes, a “quick two-minute interruption” can be costly. It can pull a maker out of a flow state that might take them thirty minutes to re-achieve, and that’s if they are lucky and skilled at getting into flow in the first place.

And yet, I have learned that being too strict—closing yourself off completely for too long—can crush serendipity. If we hide away too much, we miss out on the inspiring collisions and creative capacity that come from the collective human experience.

So the reframe here is to recognize that productivity looks dramatically different depending on your role. A packed calendar may be productive for a manager; a completely empty calendar may be absolute gold for a maker.

Today’s Invitation: If you are a leader, I invite you to audit your Calendar Conformity. Are you bulldozing your team’s productivity with your own grid? It’s worth opening a conversation about this.

And if you are a maker: Are you feeling pressured to conform to the manager’s norm? While it may be tempting to fill our calendar because it makes us feel busy and important, deep making requires spaciousness. Where and when can you clear the grid?

I’ll see you next week.

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Show Notes

• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham
• The Concept: Calendar Conformity
• The Charles Dickens Letters on Internet Archive
• Cameron’s book: Malaria, Poems

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