Somewhere out there in the blogisphere I came across a venture capitalist's blog posting about how he schedules time with his fundees. As a former startup founder he remembered the need for large unstructured/uninterrupted blocks of time for creative production. Scheduling meetings in the middle of the day for those sorts of folks is a killer as it punches a hole in a possible "maker block" of time. The day is shot as far as progress goes. So, short, late meetings or early meetings are the order of the day to keep large blocks possible for working.
(pauses to google up the posting - can't find it)
For me this was a great reality check and formalized what I'd been groping toward. Some work requires enough time to get into the flow, get out all the materials (virtual or real or the combination) and crank up the brain and then a period of doing, including failed experiments and then a wrap up/secure the winnings period. The writer claimed that if you can't do all of that in one go, you won't get very far and should do something else with the time. I think he placed these lengths of useful creative time at 6 hrs minimum. I think 7 is more like it. The cool thing about this insight is that when you don't have that amount of time (for whatever reason) then you should not expect to get the new stuff done and should instead schedule "support" or "utility" work for those times and be happy with that. "Progress" is off the table until you can get a proper block of time. But when you have those blocks (they are hard for me to get) they need to be honored by delivering to that block of time a ready and willing brain. I can do that.
In some ways it is like the difference between quilting and draping. Draping needs a big contiguous bolt of fabric while quilting is built up from smaller bits. Not a great analogy. But then I did not schedule 6 hrs for this blog posting. So there.
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