The Genius Way Coca-Cola Employees Manage Their Email, Plus More Tips
Forget work/life balance. You can sleep when you die.
At least that's how Snapchat's Emily White and Coca Cola's Wendy Clark said they approach time management in a hyper-connected world. And the idea of unplugging? Ha.
“Rather than the choice to consciously disconnect, there’s much more of a trend of choosing who to connect with and in what context,” White said. “It’s very much about conversations.”
During a panel at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit on Monday, White, the COO of Snapchat and a veteran of Instagram, Facebook and Google, said she now relies on her phone more than her computer to get work done. “You’re not just getting information and solving problems; you’re getting to communicate in motion like never before,” White said. “This is the reason I can have kids and still have a relationship with them, and work in the evenings when I get home [after the kids are in bed].”
For Clark, the president of sparkling brands and strategic marketing for Coca-Cola North America, being present at work or with her family is the key to living in an over-connected world. “The thing people want most from you is your focus and attention,” Clark said. “You destroy that when you think that you’re multitasking because you’re not accomplishing either.”
That means no phones at the dinner table, for her or her kids. And if she’s expecting an urgent email from the CEO when they’re putt-putt golfing, she’s found the best thing to do is tell them that mommy needs to go respond to an email for 10 minutes and hope they don’t screw up her score while she’s gone.
So when you’re constantly connected, how do you get anything done?
- Make the most of your subject lines. Clark said that at Coca-Cola, employees include tags in their subject lines to help manage email flow: URGENT, ACTION REQUIRED and INFORM.
- Form habits you can keep. Recognize that you’re setting the standard for what people in your life will do, White said. If you start emailing people at night, people will expect you to be on email at night.
- Give yourself white space during the day. Clark’s a fan of Google’s "speedy" meeting invitations, which are constrained to 50 minutes, without an option to override the system. By changing the standard for meetings to 25 or 50 minutes, the remaining five or 10 minutes can be used to check email or go to the bathroom, allowing everyone to be more present when they’re together.
- Set boundaries. Camille Preston, author of Rewired, says having boundaries will help you with willpower. Put fences up to focus on what you want to do at that time.
- Don't hit send. If you want to work on the weekends, save your emails as drafts, but don’t actually send them until Monday unless they're urgent. As a leader, you need to let people enjoy their weekends.
For more coverage of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, go here.
To continue the conversation about issues that are relevant to professional women, visit Connect: Professional Women’s Network.
Director, College Advancement and Executive Director of the LCSC Foundation at Lewis-Clark State College
8yGreat advice and ideas.
Associate Director - Microsoft Azure Cloud Lead at Accenture
8yI myself enjoy working through a "backlog" at night or specifically on a plane when I'm disconnected. This approach, I do find, could at time disrupt as I would skim emails for a few days then bombard people with replies. As a father, cyclist and business owners, I never stop and a balanced approach to mail is essential. Grouping, search, tasks all help me maintain sanity via email, but the biggest thing that helps me setting the expectation of my peers and direct reports - What should I be included on, what not and so forth. We live in an age of total information overload as I haven't even mentioned that I'm an avid social media participant, so what to do with it all? Again, pick your topics and focus in on it. It is simply impossible to be the expert in it all, but if you pick your subject matter, you can get quite deep into a topic simply by following thought leaders, participating in groups and the like. With the introduction of new tools to manage interactions, I do wonder where it all will go? Will Yammer and other enterprise collaboration tool simply ADD to our burden of platforms to monitor or will it cut down on the amount of email / instant messages and WhatsApp's we receive? Time will tell.
Medical Laboratory Scientist, Educator & Administrative Manager
9yI like the subject line tags, but as far as sending emails at a time when others can deal with them...I think that is too confining. I understand that sending emails late at night may be challenging to turn away from, for some, but for me, I compete a lot of work (particularly for my volunteer commitments) when everyone else is sleeping. I think the best advise is to not have expectations on response time out side of the business day. If I send an email "outside normal business hours", I do not have the expectation that I will receive an immediate reply...I can always wait until "normal working hours".
#jimnico
9yThere is something beyond ironic about this post. I remember in the middle of one of my insomnia battles I read the line: Forget work/life balance. You can sleep when you die. I have felt better about my lack of sleep but high production life. But I couldn't remember where I read the line. Thank you Jacky.
GBS UK Communications Lead at Siemens Global Business Services (GBS)
9yPhilippa Simmonds