"...the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.

"

- Charles Dickens
July 2009
Paul Graham
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them
more.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's
embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day 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.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're
done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common
among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They 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.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two
pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the
manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's
schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to
another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon.
But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start
something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits
rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly
depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough
to kill them off.

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule,
they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that
some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

Our case is an unusual one. Nearly all investors, including all VCs I know, operate on the manager's schedule. But Y Combinator runs on the
maker's schedule. Rtm and Trevor and I do because we always have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she's gotten into sync with us.

I wouldn't be surprised if there start to be more companies like us. I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or at least postpone,
turning into managers, just as a few decades ago they started to be able to resist switching from jeans to suits.

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule
within the maker's: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks of time are at
the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at
the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time
as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods,
office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.

When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till
about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what
I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and
one on the maker's.

When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative
meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out
you can help one another in some way.

Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free if
you're on the manager's schedule. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to "grab
coffee," for example.

Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes
that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an
email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work;
or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.

Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our
schedules or offend people. But now that I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something explaining the two
types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule starts to be more widely
understood, it will become less of a problem.

Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those
on the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost.
"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."

- Tara Ploughman

"The condition of man is already close to satiety and arrogance, and there is danger of destruction of everything
in existence."

- a Brahmin to Onesicritus, 327 BC, reported in Strabo's Geography

"Change breaks the brittle."

- Jan Houtema

The sons of Hermes love to play,

And only do their best when they
Are told they oughtn't;
Apollo's children never shrink
From boring jobs but have to think
Their work important.

- W. H. Auden, Under Which Lyre

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."

- Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a
truth generally admitted."

- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

"Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all."

- Winston Churchill

"Many big people were chasing me. I didn't know what to do. So I thought I would surprise them and throw it."

- Garo Yepremian, Miami placekicker, after a disastrous attempt to throw a pass in the Super Bowl.

"That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing
captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose
conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day."

- Johnson, Lives of the Poets: Dryden

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

- Alan Kay
"But the audience is right. They're always, always right. You hear directors complain that the advertising was
lousy, the distribution is no good, the date was wrong to open the film. I don't believe that. The audience is never
wrong. Never."

- William Friedkin, in a NYT interview

"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong
problem. Work hard to improve."

- Alan Perlis

"Frankly, I don't think you could have driven a needle up my sphincter using a sledgehammer."

- Col. Barry Horne, F-117 pilot, on first mission over Baghdad

"Two centuries later a most clear-sighted historian of the Second Crusade can find space in a short narrative to
record on many occasions the flattery, perjury, perfidy, blasphemy, heresy, arrogance, servility, deceit, pride,
cunning and infidelity of the Greeks."

- R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages

"The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man."

- Richard Feynman

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without
understanding."

- Brandeis

"People who read Cosmopolitan magazine are very different from those who do not."

- Donald Berry, Statistics: A Bayesian Perspective

"The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating
them as adults...."

- Arnold Toynbee, Experiences

"Americans spend an average of four hours a day watching TV, an hour of that enduring ads. That adds up to an
astounding 10% of total leisure time; at current rates, a typical viewer fritters away three years of his life getting
bombarded with commercials."

- Scott Woolley, Forbes

"The best writing is rewriting."

- E. B. White

"Modern invention has been a great leveller. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic
measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance."

- Ivor Brown, The Heart of England

"If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best."

- Donald Hall, Poetry and Ambition

"I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered."

- Evelyn Waugh, Diary (26 Dec 47)

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."

- Donald Knuth

"In France those absurd perversions of the art of war which covered themselves under the name of chivalry were
more omnipotent than in any other country of Europe. The strength of the armies of Philip and John of Valois was
composed of a fiery and undisciplined aristocracy which imagined itself to be the most efficient military force in
the world, but which was in reality little removed from an armed mob."

- C. W. C. Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages

"The public should always be wondering how it is possible to give so much for the money."

- Henry Ford

"None ever wished it longer than it is."

- Johnson on Paradise Lost

"Many large and high class greengrocers of my acquaintance have never heard of the Golden Wonder potato."

- Roy Genders, Vegetables for the Epicure

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

- Yeats, The Second Coming

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us
happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

- Charles Kingsley
"The path from good to evil goes through bogus."

- Tara Ploughman

"Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great
compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow
humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts."

- Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

"Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people."

- G. M. Trevelyan, "Bias in History"

"He became an object of ridicule in 1993 when a paper published an intercepted phone call in which he told his
lover Camilla Parker Bowles he wanted to be reincarnated as her tampon."

- Reuters story, on Prince Charles

"We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making."

- Carl Winfeld

"From this place she sent into the world those novels, which by many have been placed on the same shelf as the
works of a D'Arblay and an Edgeworth."

- Henry Austen on his sister Jane, in a preface to Persuasion

"The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases."

- Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

"The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was followed ultimately by economic and
technological recovery. But the depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of
decline and exhaustion."

- Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, 1975

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."

- J. K. Galbraith, Letter to Kennedy, 1962

"A typical dinner from the ape menu would be tofu bake with ratatouille of aubergine, onions and sweet peppers,
with pearled barley and vegetable side dishes, says the team."

- New Scientist
"Guy Steele leads a small team of researchers in Burlington, Massachusetts, who are taking on an enormous
challenge-- create a programming language better than Java."

- Sun.Com (my italics)

"I had my own reactions to Paul's essay-- on the whole I liked it but when I connected some dots I found some
suggestions of things I strongly disliked-- not so much in the essay as suggested by it."

- reaction to What You Can't Say in a blog

"Your twenties are always an apprenticeship, but you don't always know what for."

- Jan Houtema

"In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural
explanations of phenomena."

- AP story on Kansas Board of Education

"A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of
your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming."

- Peter Medawar, Memoirs of a Thinking Radish

"Never offer what you'd hate someone for accepting."

- Tara Ploughman

"The pagans were incensed at the rashness of a recent and obscure sect, which presumed to accuse their
countrymen of error, and to devote their ancestors to eternal misery."

- Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

"Simultaneously reifying and challenging hegemonic codes of race, class, gender and regional or national identity,
his characters explore the complex and changing postmodern cultural landscape."

- Robert Bennett, English professor at Montana State, announcing a panel discussion about Brad Pitt

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought
or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists
and will persist."

- Eisenhower, Farewell Address

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great
make you feel that you, too, can become great."

- Mark Twain
"However little television you watch, watch less."

- David McCullough

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word."

- Stephen King

"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater
danger."

- Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

"As all these results were obtained, not by any heroic method, but by patient and detailed reasoning, I began to
think it probable that philosophy had erred in adopting heroic remedies for intellectual difficulties, and that
solutions were to be found merely by greater care and accuracy. This view I have come to hold more and more
strongly as time went on, and it has led me to doubt whether philosophy, as a study distinct from science and
possessed of a method of its own, is anything more than an unfortunate legacy from theology."

- Bertrand Russell, "Logical Atomism"

"Get the important things right."

- N. P. Calderwood

"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost
superfluous."

- Gibbon

"I do not know what the Lord's anointed, his Vicegerent upon earth, divinely appointed by him, and accountable
to none but him for his actions, will either think or do, upon these symptoms of reason and good sense which
seem to be breaking out all over France: but this I foresee, that, before the end of this century, the trade of both
King and Priest will not be half so good a one as it has been."

- Chesterfield, letter to his son, 13 Apr 1752

"filter(P, S) is almost always written clearer as [x for x in S if P(x)]"

- Guido van Rossum on Python

"I'm surrounded by postmodern idiots and blatherers. Your writings give me hope."

- email from a reader

"In the last analysis, productivity of labour is the most important, the principal thing for the victory of the new
social system."
- Lenin, quoted in First Five-Year Plan for the Development of the National Economy of the People's Republic of
China in 1953-1957

"Most interesting phenomena have multiple causes."

- N. P. Calderwood

"From 1911 to 1920, the mood of the city varied between utter dullness and tremendous excitement."

- Arthur Coffman, An Illustrated History of Palo Alto

"People don't change their minds. They die, and are replaced by people with different opinions."

- Arturo Albergati

"No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it."

- John Adams

"PowerPoint makes us stupid."

- General James N. Mattis, USMC

"The best way to do something 'lean' is to gather a tight group of people, give them very little money, and very
little time."

- Bob Klein, chief engineer of the F-14 program

"But camels, though odious to view and endowed with the offensive spirit, did not enjoy the blessing of
pachydermaty."

- F. E. Adcock, The Greek and Macedonian Art of War

"As it turned out, the obvious clearly stated, and combined with new observations, was sometimes close to
revolutionary."

- Wallace Stegner on John Wesley Powell

"Focusing is about saying no."

- Steve Jobs

"The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and
historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the
dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited
to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary
restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive
with it."
- John F. Kennedy

"In the Zenith Color chassis there are no printed circuits, no production shortcuts. Every connection is carefully
hand-wired with the same exacting care that makes Zenith America's largest selling TV, and your best Color TV
buy."

- Zenith TV ad, 1964

"Semper aut discere, aut docere, aut scribere dulce habui."

- Bede

"The qualities that made for success in a fighter-pilot seemed to be just those sturdy qualities that made for
success in other professions; observation, initiative, determination, courage, including the courage to run away.
In course of time it appeared that men who had a private axe to grind beyond the public axe of the King's
enemies were especially successful."

- Jim Bailey, The Sky Suspended

"Everything about it was visibly mis-shapen, corrupt, crawling, verminous; for a time I could not bear to look at
it, and passed with averted eyes; recovering from this weakness, I forced myself to look, and to face day by day
the question: a thing so obviously, so incontrovertibly, so indefensibly bad, why had Scott done it?"

- R. G. Collingwood on the Albert Memorial

"Anybody who cares less about wanting to be cool, I think, is more interesting."

- Aimee Mann

"The late Richard Feynman, a superb physicist, said once as we talked about the laser that the way to tell a great
idea is that, when people hear it, they say, 'Gee, I could have thought of that.'"

- Charles Townes, How the Laser Happened

"If we chose always to be wise we should rarely need to be virtuous. But inclinations which we could easily
overcome irresistibly attract us. We give in to slight temptations and minimize the danger. We fall insensibly into
dangerous situations, from which we could easily have safeguarded ourselves, but from which we cannot
withdraw without heroic efforts which appal us. So finally, as we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has
made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to
climb out of the pit, because I made you strong enough not to fall in.'"

- Rousseau, Confessions, Cohen trans.

"Constantly fortified with the new blood of immigrants who saw America as a place where anything was possible,
the nation had adopted an ethos that elevated problem solving to the status of religion."

- John Hoyt Williams, A Great and Shining Road

"That 95 per cent. fail of those who start in business upon their own account seems incredible, and yet such are
said to be the statistics upon the subject."

- Andrew Carnegie, 1896

"You should never turn a man's generosity as a sword against him. Any virtue that a man has, even if he has
many vices, should not be used as a tool against him."

- Rabi to Feynman

"You can't say I didn't try really hard, 'cause I'm trying really hard to be good."

- Tom Petty

"He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car,
while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night."

- divorce complaint of Richard Feynman's second wife

"The development of this aircraft was long and complex even by Soviet standards, partially explained by the fact
that its entire design team was in jail."

- Howard Moon on the TU-2

"It is said that there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born
indistinguishable and are molded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is 'childless.'"

- Steven Pinker

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

- Sherlock Holmes

His notions fitted things so well,

That which was which he could not tell;
But oftentimes mistook th' one
For th' other, as great clerks have done.

- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse
proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to
work."

- John Gall

"The Muslims of al-Andalus had nothing to learn from their Christian neighbours and were incurious about them.
Geographers' accounts of Christian Spain tended to be cursory in the extreme: it was cold, the inhabitants were
barbarians who ate pigs, you could get slaves there – that was about the sum of it."
- Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain

"When the enemy is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him."

- Napoleon

"Leave me alone, I'm trying to build! Don't you know how people build? By concentrating!"

- my 5 year old son, building Lego

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field."

- Niels Bohr

"Don't fear moving slowly. Fear standing still."

- Chinese proverb

"I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time."

- Charlie Munger

"The handicap under which most beginning writers struggle is that they don't know how to write."

- Wodehouse

"Then in 1888 came the publication of Denton's history of England in the fifteenth century. This was a
masterpiece of egregious perversity, depicting the later Middle Ages as a culminating period of ruinous taxation,
iniquitous labour laws, demoralizing pestilences, and lavish dissipation of national resources upon violent and
embittered domestic feuds and futile and indecisive foreign wars. The credulity of even the most undiscriminating
reader was taxed to a degree by a portrayal in which horror succeeded upon cataclysm, in a thickening
atmosphere of crime and terror, want, degradation, and wretchedness."

- A. R. Bridbury