# How Heroku Works - Maker's Day

DevFeed: [How Heroku Works - Maker's Day](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/how-heroku-works-maker-s-day-41104.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.craigkerstiens.com/2011/11/07/how-heroku-works-maker-day/>)

Author: Map

Published: 2011-11-07T20:55:56Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Craig Kerstiens](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/craig-kerstiens.md>)

Topics: [Heroku](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/heroku.md>), [meetings](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/meetings.md>), [context](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/context.md>)

Tags: [business](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/business.md>), [context](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/context.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [heroku](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/heroku.md>), [meetings](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/meetings.md>), [productivity](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/productivity.md>), [teams](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/teams.md>)

## AI overview

The article describes Maker's Day at Heroku, a weekly Thursday reserved for engineers to work without meetings or other interruptions. It explains that the practice is intended to protect uninterrupted focus and reduce productivity losses from context switching.

## Source excerpt

In my earlier post on Teams and Tools at Heroku, I mentioned how we value engineers' time; their work has enabled us to build a great platform. As a result of what we've built, we've had great growth both of our platform and of our teams internally. With that growth inevitably comes different distractions on engineers' time. Despite how a manager may plan things, engineering work needs long periods of uninterrupted time. To ensure that no matter what, an engineer has plenty of opportunity to do the work he or she was hired to do, Heroku has Maker's Day. Maker's Day ensures that engineers get a full day of uninterrupted time to focus on making things. The more consistent interruptions are throughout an engineer's day, the more time will be lost due to context switching in addition to the time spent on those other activities. These interruptions may include a quick question from a manager, a question on a code problem someone else is working through, or an email or IM from a coworker. Regardless of the type of interruption, it causes an engineer to lose focus. According to Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, in a study regarding productivity among engineers, the top performers when surveyed said they were interrupted regularly 38% of the time versus the bottom performers, who were interrupted 76%. Context switching should be counted as fully wasted time for an engineer, and all too often as the number of meetings increases, the time involved with context switching is increased similarly to the following: For more on how interruptions or context switching decreases productivity, Jeff Atwood has a great post about The Multi-Tasking Myth, which demonstrates ... Most people understand that context switching is bad, but another team may still have valid demands on your time. Pushing back against another team or manager isn't always feasible; after all, we do work together, and each team at times may need something from another team. This is where Maker's Day starts to