If you didn't have to answer email all day, what would you do with the extra time? SMT Shorts

if you didn't have to answer emails all day you can actually get on with the day to day work you could have conversations with clients i remember when i first started in media lot longer ago that i would like to remember we just used to pick up the phone and talk to our clients and that human one-to-one connection was so important for doing business because you know now we slightly when we make appointments by email to make a phone call and if we didn't use email as our primary means of communication I mean hey I'm here at South by Southwest I've called my apps going Mia catting you know twitter facebook Instagram it's all going on and but still email is my primary means of communication for important stuff and it's time consuming is draining it absorbs your time it absorbs your attention and I just think that we need to kill it it's dead time to move on from you know um if I didn't have to answer email all day I feel like I would have a lot more time for strategic thinking and planning and really getting at the heart of what girls who code is doing you know spending more time reaching girls and classrooms on the ground evangelizing for women in tech and I would have so much more time I well first of all since I work for myself I don't have to answer emails all day and I think if you're being bogged down by email if your work is becoming work and it's not part of a lifestyle that you're enjoying them maybe you're doing the wrong thing or maybe you need some help to answer the flow of emails but as for myself because i live in entrepreneurial lifestyle i get to do what i want to do which includes going to various events whether i'm speaking or not and essentially playing just being myself like this because my shirt says yourself everyone is taken and i think people that authentically live that lifestyle then they're going to do what they want to do and find a way to bring the greatest value to the world within the 24 hours each day that we're allotted I would definitely go skiing no seriously I think the most rewarding part of my job is when I can get my team together and brainstorm ways to connect with customers that's just so fun so the more time that we can make to think about innovative and breakthrough ways to serve customers that's how it's been my time wow I didn't have to answer emails all day I would be out with clients and partners and entrepreneurs and I would not be spending that time on email and I'm lucky because I'm at IBM or I get IBM verse so I get to do exactly that I try not to answer emails all day already Chris Sacca gave a speech here at South by Southwest I want to say like seven years ago and he said always managed fields to do list and never manage to your inbox and I certainly try and live like that as much as possible the reality is I do spend a lot of time yeah answering email I guess if I wasn't answering email then the question would be well how am i communicating with other people who are important to me important to projects that we're working on together so I don't know necessarily what that looks like in terms of what that communication flow would look like in the future but I know that I'd still need to be communicating with people so I guess I'd be doing that still and hopefully I've been doing that in a more pleasant way than the current kind of oppression of oppressive amount of email that we all get love to not have to answer emails all day but if we didn't have to you know I'm a creative person and i would spend the time creating brainstorming really kind of trying to be visual i have a big whiteboard and i'd be drawing and really planning and mapping out the different types of strategies or the different type of content i wanted to produce and it would really be an interesting freeing opportunity quite possibly something we should maybe all do once in a while good day off email and try and replicate that ourselves wouldn't it be wonderful so I'm working on a new project right now about gender differences in the workplace specifically tied to leadership behaviors because I think that's where the rubber really meets the road it's less about gender equality and leaning in if you will which has been great about raising visibility to the idea that actually people are our work isn't done and that we still have work to do but I'm spending a lot of time doing research and going back in history and learning about women both yesterday as well as today and I certainly would spend more time doing that than answering email any day of the week if I didn't have to answer emails all day I'd

probably run a marathon because I get about 400 emails a day so I'd have plenty of time but really i would spend more time with my team really getting into being able to do work again you know i think for me it's tough to actually work and I'd spend all my time writing proposals and then meetings and doing strategy and I'd really like to spend more time mentoring my team I think that's where I'd spend my time so this one's really interesting because you know this almost the juxtaposition here do we read emails all day because we need to well because the software that we now use is taught us to do that and how do we break free from that sort of you know that sort of economy of how our time is being spent but Sony if I did have more time and I didn't have as many emails to read although i'd spend a lot more time learning I think there's not enough time in companies where people sit back and they think okay how do they do things in a different way what are the new things that are happening out there the pace of change is breathtaking so I think in order to take advantage of that pace of change sometimes people they could take need to take agree then need to step back a bit and really just start to broaden their knowledge and horizons and so I would spend a lot more time reading a lot my time learning and then trying to apply that to the industry and certainly that's where my best ideas happen is when I'm sitting back to thinking and not answering emails