How Future Billionaires Get Sh*t Done

I think notebooks are great for ideas. I think like a well-managed to-do list is a software product that you need to adopt, and there's like 80 of them. I actually don't even care which one you adopt, but it's like when I like tell something to founders and then they write it down in a notebook, I'm like that's gone forever. But they look cool; they have like a fountain pen and they're like taking beautiful notes.

Michael: We all know that everything important is…

This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. Today we're going to talk about how future billionaires get things done. So, Dalton, you were inspired by a PG post when thinking of this idea, right?

Dalton: Yeah, Paul Graham wrote this really famous blog post, I believe called "Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule," where he said something that all of us had thought before, but he put it very succinctly and in great words. So if you haven't read it before, anyone out there on the internet, you should read it. Just Google "Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule." We can put a link in. He introduces the idea of the difference between how makers, ie programmers in his case, organize their time to be productive versus folks that are managers.

Michael: Alright, and so it's great terminology, it's good stuff.

Dalton: Yes, so let's start with the maker mode. You were a developer in your startup; I was a business guy in my startup. I think in many ways this stuff came a little bit more natively to you, and I had to learn this stuff by like basically destroying the productivity of my co-founders. So how did you think about makers mode as a founder?

Dalton: Most companies are set up around a manager schedule, where you have a day packed with meeting after meeting. So if you're a programmer at a big company, you would have to, you know, you'd have like an hour to program here, an hour to program there, and this is bad. This was not conducive to building things.

Michael: Okay.

Dalton: And so to just walk through my perspective of someone that, you know, was programming back in the day when I was a startup founder, when you're programming the more of the program you can keep in your head at any one time, the easier it is for you to know what's going on and have the context up here to make changes and fix bugs.

Dalton: It takes like an hour or two cold of looking at a program and figuring stuff out for it to get loaded into RAM, so to speak. And so if you're interrupted, like if you have to program in hour increments, man, are you gonna suck? Like you constantly have to restart your state every time you program.

Dalton: And so a great maker schedule is something like an eight-hour uninterrupted block of time. His argument, I think, he was also talking about this from the perspective of an artist or a musician; like if you wanted to record an album or write music or if you wanted to write a book, the same deal. If you had to write a book in 20-minute increments, I think a lot of writers wouldn't love that.

Michael: Fair.

Dalton: Which is so much different than the business guy. Like I, you know, I was the business guy at my startup, and you certainly can do email in 20-minute increments or hour increments.

Dalton: And so I remember having this conversation with Emmett, where he said, "Michael, imagine that I'm doing ridiculously complicated word problems and you're interrupting me in the middle of them." And I was like, then it clicked. I was like, "Oh, well, I've had to do hard work; like I went to school, I had to do that." That's what your day is like.

Dalton: One, that sounds a lot harder than writing emails, but two, I would hate to be interrupted like that. And once he said that, it kind of clicked.

Dalton: Before he said that, I just assumed, well, you know, he's typing, and I remember when I read the post, what resonated with me is I felt like my work day really began around five or six PM. Isn't that weird?

Dalton: And that's because that's when things would quiet down, and I would stop getting email, and the building I was working out of would quiet down. And that's where actually all the good programming happened, was at the end of the day.

Dalton: What was interesting was that for us we basically...