To elaborate on an area brought up in the Choosing a Name entry, the Makers vs Managers work schedule. Simply it is the understanding that Makers, persons who are producing material through a creative process, require blocks of time hours and greater parts of days to produce the material needed to be able to fully resolve design problems. Managers are those that are able to cut up the day in hour to hour chunks of time, they are needed sometimes to keep the Makers on task in an overall scope of many projects, but they do not need longer periods of time to accomplish the task at hand.
This comparison has been made by many others under different titles and opinions, but the Makers vs Managers if the one that stuck with us. Mostly do from actual experience in trying to juggle the two sides. In working with a construction company in the design-build process I was in charge of all design work produced by the company, this was a new direction for the business so it testing this format out I was also the only one producing any work for any of the projects. In times this worked great, I would control my own schedule and have large chunks of time to develop projects designs, also going to preliminary meetings to run down new projects. The overlap or better the collision of these two was the issue, needing that first half of the day to knock out some material to stay on schedule with a project, but being asked to sit in on or attend meetings suddenly to have someone to provide input on any design work needed for the project. So that block of time to be used to invest yourself in a project and produce the work needed is interrupted by other potential jobs. This leads to regular late nights and early mornings to work when others to have the time to do what needs to be done.
Don’t get me wrong both sides of this are needed to be successful, you will just need to schedule yourself accordingly and let those you work with be aware of when you will be available to meet for those potential new jobs. The Managers schedule differs from being, not less full than the Makers schedule, but more easily able to insert a last minute meeting with a potential client that won’t disrupt the entire flow of the day. I can easily remember finally getting into a groove on project, making great headway to be asked to sit in on a meeting or if I would be available the second half of the day to meet on site to look at a possible new job when it was originally planned to catch up on the work interrupted on by the impromptu meeting.
All these things need to happen to keep your current clients project on schedule and to be able to bring in new projects, just need to be aware of the scheduling and timing of it all or one side or the other may suffer.