I Struggle to Manage My Time

The Curse of a Creative Wanderer

Hi, it’s me. I know I keep saying this, but thank you again for being an early subscriber to my newsletter. Last week’s practice newsletter accidentally included the wrong subtitle after the email subject line (now I know what that form field does 🙄). It was a horrible mess that I’m sure you didn’t even notice, but it made me feel better knowing that we’re iterating our way through this experience together.

Jen Zug Writes officially launches September 21st!

The other day I googled “What is the opposite of a Type A person” and this image came up in the top five search results.

First of all, what is this nonsense? Secondly, by this image it would appear I am a Type A person since my job requires working on a computer and not sashaying ambiguously. To be clear: I am not a Type A person, and I Would Like to See the Manager about updating this visual representation of Type B personalities. 

As a creative and intuitive person (INFP 👋), I tend toward the “do what feels good when the inspiration hits!” end of the productivity spectrum (so maybe I sashay ambiguously mentally). Any time I take an assessment to evaluate my leadership style or personality, I get placed in categories with names like Dreamer, Idealist, or Perceiver. One description of my type read that if I worked for a manager (or perhaps had a husband? … 🤫) who values promptness, neatness, and structured decision making, I will have to work a bit harder. ( 🤦🏼‍♀️ )

After a while I started to wonder if all the descriptions written for my type were written by someone who misunderstood and undervalued my type, because I’ve always felt the weight of having to work a bit harder rather than the freedom of leaning into my dreamer and idealistic qualities. After all, I’m good at being loyal, compassionate, and intuitive about people, but these aren’t the top qualities employers are looking for in a candidate. (Why, tho?)

I’ve always wished that Getting Things Done came more naturally to me.

NEVERTHELESS (I love it when I get to smoosh three words together), early on in my life and career I figured out how to adapt my intuitive and wandering soul to a life of rigid task and calendar conformity by dividing my week into Maker versus Manager time. In 2009, a guy named Paul Graham wrote this essay about the different time and focus needs for different roles within an organization. Reading it changed my life.

In the essay, Graham describes how Managers tend to schedule their time in thirty minute increments. They go from meeting to meeting, check tasks off their list, make phone calls, and evaluate the work of other people. Makers tend to schedule themselves several hours at a time. These are the writers, coders, artists, and strategists who need to descend deep into a well of concentration to do their best work. 

To Makers, a thirty minute meeting means a lengthy commute up from that well of concentration, plus a lengthy commute back into it when the meeting is done. Makers can be quirky -- most of us can’t just turn our focus on and off like Managers do. So when all is said and done, that thirty minute meeting may end up costing me ninety minutes of focused productivity time! As a writer who is also highly tactical, I immediately recognized the need to organize my week into blocks of Maker and Manager time.

Custom illustration by my friend and former business partner, Andrew Imamura.

It’s made a huge difference! Now I block out chunks of time on my calendar labeled Focus Work that can’t be scheduled over, which gives me the breathing room I need to be sane as well as good at the creative parts of my job. 

I may not actually be a Type A person, but I’m learning how to act like one.

Question of the Week

Now it’s your turn: If you could wake up tomorrow with a new talent or ability of your choosing, what would it be? Leave a comment (link has been corrected)!

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