Many professionals boast about working long hours, but this time is often filled with distractions and low-impact tasks. The focus should be on eliminating "whack hours"—unproductive time spent doom-scrolling or in pointless meetings—and working with deep focus when you're on the clock.

Managers work in small time blocks, so a meeting is just one of many. Makers require large, uninterrupted chunks. A single meeting breaks a large block into two unusable smaller ones, effectively destroying an entire half-day's worth of productive output for the maker.

As companies scale, the supply of obvious, valuable work dwindles. To stay busy, employees engage in "hyper-realistic work-like activities"—tasks that mimic real work (e.g., meetings to review decks for other meetings) but generate no value. It's a leader's job to create a sufficient supply of *known valuable work*.

Leaders often burn out because their team is overly reliant on them. This dependency isn't a sign of a weak team but rather a leader's subtle micromanagement and failure to truly empower them, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of indispensability.

Businesses invest heavily in recruiting top talent but then micromanage them, preventing them from using their full cognitive abilities. This creates a transactional environment where employees don't contribute their best ideas, leaving significant value unrealized.

A maker's most critical work is often invisible problem-solving, which can look like being stuck or idle. This period of intense thought is not a precursor to work; it is the work itself. Judging makers on visible activity misses the point and devalues the creative process.

The Zeigarnik effect causes the brain to fixate on open loops, like a future meeting. For a maker, this scheduled task consumes mental bandwidth, disrupts immersion, and forces clock-watching, killing productivity hours before the meeting even begins. The cost is far greater than the meeting's duration.