Leverage Weekly #51 - Adjusting the schedule

tl;dr - The organization schedule is a central coordination point

Last week, I said that organizations are machines made from people. We can begin to unpack that with a simple example: setting the schedule of the organization. In previous times, I did not believe that schedule mattered; at early Leverage, anyone could work as much or as little as they wanted. Schedules were synchronized only by the occurrence of some regular meetings and presentations and all of those were optional.

Now, however, it is clear that schedules matter. The organization’s schedule, including weekly and monthly meetings, quarterly and annual activities, help to set the cadence of the work and synchronize the organization with everything else in the world. The schedule is also notably difficult to set because one is, at the same time, linking together all of the people in the organization and connecting the organization to its many external stakeholders. It’s a difficult thing to do well.

The easiest place to see the challenge of the schedule is at the level of individuals. Different people have different workflows. Some people work well in morning, others in the evening. Some need to take a break for lunch, others prefer to work through lunch. This is sometimes not a small thing—productivity can vary by 100x or more depending on whether a person’s schedule is set up well or poorly. People will know this from their own experience. When can you be interrupted? When are you at your best?

In order to get the most from a person, you often need to accommodate their personal pattern of work. Within an organization, one will quickly find that one is accommodating many people. But those people all then need to be able to communicate with each other. Even without considering the outside world, setting the schedule is already a challenging task: you have to manage many different tendencies and constraints at the same time.

To set the schedule of an organization, it pays to learn the specific work habits and predilections of every member. The easiest way to get started is to ask people direct questions about their work and productivity and listen carefully to what they say. People prefer to be productive, so this should be approached with the actual desire to help them being productive. Since people are counterintuitive and individual, they often will say things that will surprise you.

There are a few reasons, however, to not simply believe what people say at first. In some cases, people will try to game the situation (“I work much better when unsupervised!”). In many more cases, however, people will tell you what they think you want to hear. It can take repeatedly questioning to get to a person’s real preference, which may entirely be in line with what the organization needs. There is also the fact that people sometimes need structure imposed from the outside; this is one of the reasons that organizations are useful. (More on that later.)

Even when one has gotten as much information as one can about people’s actual work practices, there is still a further problem: linking them all together might not result in a coherent whole that can interact with demands from the outside. The good news is that people are usually intent on their own organization’s success, which means that it often possible to balance internal and external needs in a way that ends up being motivational overall.

The schedule isn’t the central wiring diagram of the organization. It’s also not the most important thing. But tiny changes in schedule can make a big difference. Those differences can compound, making careful attention to the schedule, and even small adjustments, very important to the success of the organization overall.

The organization schedule is a central coordination point.

This was a surprisingly disjointed week for the team at Leverage. I took off Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as part of a “Geoff should take some time off occasionally” experiment. Oliver and Melinda took off Friday again, finishing off their CTO from the January retreat. We nevertheless got a lot done. Oliver helped the Quantum Biology Institute define its recruiting function and formalize its search for a Head of Biology. Melinda verified that their Coinbase account was up and compiled guidance on non-profit compensation. I’ve been helping to design systems to defend Clarice’s ability to do concentrated work.

(For people just tuning in now, Oliver, Melinda, and I are the core Leverage team. We provide support services to scientific projects. Our first official partner is the Quantum Biology Institute; we helped their team raise $6.8 million for quantum biology in 2024. I’m now helping their Institute leadership and communication, Oliver is providing support for recruiting and culture, and Melinda is helping cover operations and legal. Quantum biology is the first area where we think we’ve broken a scientific bottleneck. You can learn more about that on our website; see the Bottlenecks program.)

A few things this week related to fixing, adjusting, or creating schedules. My experiment with time off is meant to help me figure out how to channel some of my non-Leverage creative energy into things other than Leverage. I’d say this experiment worked as an experiment, in that I learned some things, but failed otherwise. More experimentation is called for!

Apart from that, we had to synchronize Leverage’s and the Quantum Biology Institute’s schedules, which meant we had to first figure out ideal working conditions for Clarice, their president and lead scientist. After some resistance, Clarice stopped trying to throw herself on her sword and admitted that she preferred lots of uninterrupted time and to be shielded from a bunch of social media. We’re working on building “the wall” right now and this is a win for literally everyone involved.

Once we got that in place, we had to find a Leverage/QuBiT (the name of the team) meeting time that worked for two organizations. We agreed on Monday morning, but that required us (Leverage) to move our daily check-ins one hour earlier, to 10am ET. Melinda apparently interpreted this as referring to all weekdays, and so we’re now going to try 10am ET rather than 11am ET.

This may seem like small things: getting vacation right, blocking off time for uninterrupted work for a lead contributor, changing the time of daily check-in. In some ways, they are. But people will know from their own experience that changes in such things can have large effects—and those effects can be cumulative. I can easily imagine a +10% boost from getting vacation right and +50% from giving Clarice uninterrupted time, at least. As for the morning check-in, I don’t know what to anticipate. We’ll pay close attention and make further adjustments as needed.