Maker’s and Managers
I found this article by Paul Graham about maker’s schedule vs. Manager’s schedule.
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.
It’s a good read, and I found a lot of good points especially from the maker’s side of things.
Mostly he talks from the angle of meetings, but for me this goes for any type of interruption. Conference calls, emails, IMs, tweets, text messages, letter, anything.
Anyway, it’s a good reference, especially if you’ve called me and I’ve seemed a bit distracted on the phone ;)
What’s the good word?
About two years ago my wife and I bought a house here in Atlanta. Since we weren’t super familiar with the area and how much things cost we enlisted the help of a realtor. No big deal right, just your standard realtor/buyer relationship.
I don’t know how we found her, but she was great. I mean she really earned her commission, answering our noob questions, finding great houses based on our wants/needs (and not based on her commission or what she wanted to sell). And there was a happy ending with us finding the house that fit us and our budget.
So of course when a friend started their house hunt we recommended her. She did a great job for us, and we knew she would do a great job for them as well. Which turned out to be true.
A few weeks back our realtor asked to take us out to dinner to thank us for the referral. Apparently that one referral had turned into 3 more listings and sales (one of which she was both the buyer and seller agent!) and led to a contact which got her out from under a terrible boss and under someone she really respected as a mentor!
Basically the one referral had taken her business to a whole new level.
And at dinner she kept saying thank you thank you thank you. And I kept saying that she was the one who did all the work. But without our referral she wouldn’t have gotten those leads. But without her hard work we wouldn’t have referred her.
It was round and round the whole dinner!
I don’t know if she ever got what I was saying but I made the realization later that just because you do great work doesn’t mean you will get a referral. And sometimes people who don’t really do great work get referrals. But when that combination of great work and a good referral happens it can be great.
Are you doing both great work that deserve great referrals and referring great work?
