Secrets Of The Most Productive People – Jacqueline Guichelaar

“Every individual on the team is important, regardless of what time zone they’re in.”

By Tim Mcdonagh

GROUP CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CISCO

A large population of my direct reports are in the U.S., but I’ve also got people in the U.K., and in the Asia-Pacific region. And because people aren’t flying anymore, we’re doing all our strategy sessions every quarter, every month, every week on video calls. So if you want to do a 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. session, that [means people in the U.K. are] working from 5 p.m. till midnight. Because I’m so conscious of that, I’m forcing myself to sync up with my Asia-Pacific colleagues late in the evening, or my U.K. colleagues [early] in the morning.

I’ve gotten into a routine of doing it. Because I don’t think it’s fair that we work [according to] U.S. time zones. We’re a global company. Every individual on the team is important, regardless of what time zone they’re in. We’re in the middle of producing a new governance model [with] meeting times that we can share between regions so that people don’t have to work crazy hours just to stay in sync. We haven’t quite cracked it, but we’re definitely adjusting the way we work. —As told to Katharine Schwab

Time she gets up

Between 5 and 5:30 a.m.

The first thing she does in the morning

“Take a couple of deep breaths and reflect on how lucky I am. I do then turn to my phone.”

How she handles email