It’s Wednesday, and between the meetings I’ve had already and the ones that have been scheduled, it’s hard to get a work flow going. Not at Asana. A few years ago, CEO Dustin Moskovitz implemented a company-wide No Meeting Wednesdays rule. “The high-level goal of NMW is to ensure that everyone gets a large block of time each week to do focused, heads-down work,” he wrote on the company blog.
“…makers suffer greatly from interrupts in their flow time… And unlike many companies, at Asana we generally want our managers to be makers some of the time as well, so they need a structure that ensures they get some flow time too.”
What about the rest of the week? Here are some DOs and DON’T’s:
Monday. DO multitask. While evidence has always said that humans are poor multi-taskers, a new study published in Psychological Science suggests that just the thought or illusion that we are multitasking may boost our performance by making us more engaged in the tasks at hand.
“Multitasking is often a matter of perception or can even be thought of as an illusion,” explains researcher Shalena Srna of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. “Regardless of whether people actually engage in a single task or multiple tasks, making them perceive this activity as multitasking is beneficial to performance.”
DON’T send promotions. According to an Omnisend survey—titled The Best Time to Send Emails (for Better Sales)—Monday is the worst day to send promotional emails, even worse than Saturday.
Tuesday. DO post on LinkedIn. B2B audiences tend to see the most success with posting on LinkedIn on Tuesdays, according to a recent report. If you are looking to appeal to candidates for hire, you’ll want to target your posts just before candidates get off work. If you are looking to engage with industry peers, your posts can be spaced out more, while still focused on off hours, such as 11 am -1 pm and 4-7 pm.
Thursday. DON’T start a change initiative. With the end of the week near, there’s always lots to do. But according to best-selling author Daniel Pink, don’t start a big initiative. Instead, start it on the day after a holiday or at the beginning of a quarter, or on a Monday,” Pink says in his most recent book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. The basis of this is similar to research that says that we are twice as likely to run a marathon at age 29 than age 28 or 30. “Endings have this power to galvanize us,” he said—as do beginnings, when scheduled right.
DO send promotional emails. According to that Omnisend study, the optimal day for sending email newsletters—those that contain retail offers—is Thursday. The optimal time is 8 a.m. Emails sent then earned an average open rate of 20.32% and a click-through rate of 7.79%—and even more importantly, an average of eight orders per campaign.
Friday. DO post on Instagram. Trackmaven recommends that 7 pm Friday is an optimal time to post.
DO delegate something. In a recent article on redesigning your week, Fast Company wrote: “As you plan your day, ask yourself: Is this something that I really need to do myself, or could someone else do this instead?” And Friday people are generally in good moods.
DON’T send important press releases. Fridays now have the highest bounce rates, according to Omnisend.
Saturday. DO send a weekly wrap-up email. “The Saturday morning email is our Weekly which, in addition to a market summary video with one of our analysts, recaps our main stories from the previous week, somewhat like SIPA’s weekly summary that goes out on Fridays,” Ed Coburn, president, Cabot Wealth Network, wrote me a couple months ago. “That makes it a popular email with our customers. And some of the people in our database opt out of receiving the daily emails and just receive the weekly summary so that list segment is about 7% larger than the group that receives our dailies.”
Sunday. DO send an evening newsletter. At an SIIA Boot Camp in Chicago one year, Tracy Samantha Schmidt, founder of TS Media, told us that she has had great success—an over-50% open rate—with a Sunday night newsletter or “memo” that goes to executives.
“It takes two-minutes to read and we really think value,” she said. “CEOs are thinking about work at 7 pm on Sunday. I’m totally against putting everything on social media at 9 am Monday morning.” Omnisend found that their lowest unsubscribe rates came on Sunday or Monday and their highest click-to-open rates on Saturday.
