Since taking over as the CEO of Yahoo nearly 18 months ago, Marissa Mayer has pushed many of the right buttons.
Company stock more than doubled. The company has five times as many mobile employees as when she first started. In July, Yahoo registered more web traffic in the U.S. than Google for the first time since 2011.
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Mayer's success has created a sort of fan following, including one big admirer with a company of his own: Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. At Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Benioff asked Mayer to share her advice on how she keeps things running smoothly. In a room full of tech entrepreneurs and startup executives, it was a question begging for an answer.
"One of [former NFL Coach Vince Lombardi's] sayings was, 'my priorities are God, family and the Green Bay Packers in that order,'" Mayer, a Wisconsin native, replied. "I now joke that mine are God, family and Yahoo. Except I'm not that religious, so it's really family and Yahoo."
The key, Mayer said, is prioritizing what's most important each day. She takes inspiration from a former college friend, who used to make a to-do list every day, from the most important to the least important tasks on her plate. Instead of getting overwhelmed by the long list of items left unfinished, the friend would celebrate the fact that she never finished her list.
That would mean spending lots of time on relatively unimportant tasks, Mayer explained.
"If I did [get to the bottom of the list] it would be a real bummer," Mayer said. "Because think about all those things at the very bottom of your to-do list that really shouldn't take time out of your day."
Tuesday's keynote didn't just touch on how Mayer schedules her time. The CEO also talked at length about Yahoo's commitment to simplistic design and how the company is seeking a SVP of design to report directly to her.
Mayer also said that Yahoo has nearly 400 million monthly active mobile users, up from 300 million monthly actives on mobile in Q1.
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