Create your dream calendar: Freeing up space for real flow with Ashley Clark

When it comes to working together, we believe our differences only make us stronger. We talked to a handful of Dropboxers in different roles about how they think our workplace culture, particularly our focus on diversity, has led them and their teams to success as they help us help the world work better.

When she joined Dropbox in 2014, Ashley Clark was looking to make a big impact in a growing company. Since then, as a technical program manager working in infrastructure engineering, Ashley feels like she’s been able to leave the footprint she hoped to, but she knows it’s not always about the exciting projects either. Many times she’s doing maintenance work in the trenches with the rest of her team. She makes sure she has time to dig in and get her hands dirty by tactfully organizing her day.

“I don’t go to meetings that don’t have agendas. If you are in the room to brainstorm as a group and solve a high level problem, generally something in which the decision is not easily reversible, and it has a lot of tradeoff and complexity and you need to get people in the room, that makes sense. But if it’s a low-risk decision, I say cancel the meeting, somebody make the call. I tend to be pretty brutal about getting meetings off my calendar.

One exercise I did two or three years ago that has just been life-saving for me is I set up a dream calendar. You create a calendar and you schedule exactly where you would want everything if it was your world — what time you want to go to the gym, what time you want to eat, what time you do your best work. I structured this whole calendar and I ultimately just slowly moved my calendar into fitting that.”

One of the benefits of sticking to her dream calendar is that Ashley has more time to nurture her relationships with her team members. She says that Dropbox is an environment in which she can be herself, and she believes that diversity is the biggest factor in making Dropbox a place where everyone else can feel valued too.

“I place high value on cognitive diversity. People who come from various backgrounds and cultures approach problems differently. If you look at the structure of a working group, ideally the people have different approaches and understandings, and this variety in perspective combines into the most creative solutions. If you look at the bottom line from a company perspective, diverse teams build better products.”

For Ashley, helping the world to work better means getting away from counterproductive negativity. She thinks that Dropbox helps people to connect and build together, reminding them exactly how far the world has come.

“In this moment, the world is in its most technologically and socially advanced state. We have more connection to individuals and global communities than ever before. The downside of this advancement is that we’re over-inundated with damaging imagery and rhetoric everyday. With this amount of negative media, we face the constant threat of cultural nihilism, when, in reality, we have it better than any generation that came before us. Anything that helps us feel connected to stories of good is powerful and impactful.”

We need more powerful positive thinkers and innovators like Ashley on our team. Check out our job opportunities today and keep an eye out for more stories from fellow Dropboxers.