In this essay, Paul argues that developers (‘makers’) and managers have different schedules. The manager divides his day into hour blocks, and switches what he is doing each hour or so. This means meetings are ‘cheap’, because they don’t disrupt what he is doing the next or previous hour. If there’s a slot free, throw something in there.
The maker’s schedule is divided in half-day (at minimum) blocks. A single hour is about enough time to get set up to do the job she wants to do. So having an hour to work, then an hour meeting, then and hour work, is very disruptive to flow, unlike the manager. There is also a contagion effect: If she has a meeting in an hour, and she knows she’s not going to be able to get real work done between now and then, then why bother?
These schedules are fine in isolation, but in reality they need to co-exist. And managers can impose schedules on makers. They usually will impose because the managers don’t appreciate the different schedule types.
One approach is to have office hours: Only have meetings at the beginning or the end of the day, in contiguous blocks. Days can be compressed, but never interrupted.