As Graham elaborates:

Managers' days are “cut into one-hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default, you change what you’re doing every hour.”

Makers, on the other hand, “generally 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.”

For managers, interruptions in the form of meetings, phone calls, and Slack notifications are normal. For someone on the maker schedule, however, even the slightest distraction can have a disruptive effect....

The reason why many managers fail to see and address this problem is that they are used to looking at communication and assume it's a good thing. Because they see activity. People are attending meetings, talking to each other, the online presence indicators are bright green. Clearly, a lot of work is happening!

At the same time, real work is not getting done. Meaningful work is usually done quietly and in solitude....

Office hours are chunks of time that makers set aside for meetings, while the rest of the time they are free to go into a Do Not Disturb mode. Managers get their (brief) face time with the makers on their team, while makers get long stretches of time to get stuff done.

During his time as a technical lead at Buffer, Harrison Harnisch decided to apply this concept to his schedule, splitting his week up, and setting clear expectations about how a day should be treated. On Mondays and Fridays, he focused solely on collaborating with his team, while reserving the rest of the week for heads-down coding.

We have adopted a similar schedule at Nuclino, reserving several days per week for our “maker time” while working from home. It doesn't mean that we ignore all messages and only look up from our work when something is on fire – but the general expectation is that it's okay to not be immediately available to your teammates when you are focusing on your work.

Running, Training Talk.

in summary: It’s a cliché among political philosophers that if you want to create the conditions for tyranny, you sever the bonds of intimate relationships and local community. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She focused on the role of terror in breaking down social and family ties in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. But we don’t need a secret police to turn us into atomized, isolated souls. All it takes is for us to stand by while unbridled capitalism rips apart the temporal preserves that used to let us cultivate the seeds of civil society and nurture the sadly fragile shoots of affection, affinity, and solidarity.

________


"The hours in which we work, rest, and socialize are becoming ever more desynchronized.

Whereas we once shared the same temporal rhythms—five days on, two days off, federal holidays, thank-God-it’s-Fridays—our weeks are now shaped by the unpredictable dictates of our employers.

A calendar is more than the organization of days and months. It’s the blueprint for a shared life.

When so many people have long or unreliable work hours, or worse, long and unreliable work hours, the effects ripple far and wide. Families pay the steepest price. Erratic hours can push parents—usually mothers—out of the labor force. A body of research suggests that children whose parents work odd or long hours are more likely to evince behavioral or cognitive problems, or be obese. Even parents who can afford nannies or extended day care are hard-pressed to provide thoughtful attention to their kids when work keeps them at their desks well past the dinner hour.

What makes the changing cadences of labor most nepreryvka-like, however, is that they divide us not just at the micro level, within families and friend groups, but at the macro level, as a polity. Staggered and marathon work hours arguably make the nation materially richer—economists debate the point—but they certainly deprive us of what the late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter described as a “cultural asset of importance”: an “atmosphere of entire community repose.”

it’s naive to think that policies like this will become the norm. Wall Street demands improved quarterly earnings and encourages the kind of short-term thinking that drives executives to cut their most expensive line item: labor. If we want to alter the cadences of collective time, we have to act collectively, an effort that is itself undermined by the American nepreryvka. A presidential-campaign field organizer in a caucus state told me she can’t get low-income workers to commit to coming to meetings or rallies, let alone a time-consuming caucus, because they don’t know their schedules in advance.
Reform is possible, however. In Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco, “predictive scheduling” laws (also called “fair workweek” laws) require employers to give employees adequate notice of their schedules and to pay employees a penalty if they don’t.

Then there’s “right to disconnect” legislation, which mandates that employers negotiate a specific period when workers don’t have to answer emails or texts off the clock. France and Italy have passed such laws.

I gained a new appreciation for CSS Grid when building a flexible layout for a conference schedule. The needs of the project aligned perfectly with grid’s strengths: a two-dimensional (vertical and horizontal) layout with complex placement of child elements. In the process of building a proof of concept, I found a few techniques that made the code highly readable and outright fun to work with. The resulting demo included some interesting uses of CSS Grid features and forced me to grapple with some details of grid you don’t run into in every day.

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“The following is a listing and a brief description of the presentations that will be given by TPG employees during CSUN.”

“The Steelers, losers of four of their last five games, could pass the Ravens if they beat the Cincinnati Bengals and the Ravens lose to the Browns. Pittsburgh has almost no chance of earning a wild-card spot. They would need to beat the Bengals and the game between the Colts and Titans would have to end up in a tie.”