Boosting Your Marketing Productivity
I’ve been a marketer since 2012. For roughly 90% of that time, I was jumping from project to project, approaching every task abstractly – with little to no planning and lots of enthusiasm and gumption. It was the ‘mad scientist approach’.
But not only did I not have a productivity system, I actively scorned them. Marketing, I reasoned, is a creative field and a productivity system would only serve to bog me down. Instead of focusing on crafting a narrative that would stand out in a crowded field, I would be wasting precious hours of my day looking over lists and distracting myself from the actual work of getting things done.
How wrong I was. While some of my best work was accomplished with this approach (Achieving a 15.00 ROAS or a $0.03 CPA) I was inconsistent. Sure, I had moments of brilliance but they were offset by moments of sheer inertia due to procrastination.
I recently had a call with a LinkedIn Strategist where we discussed my Marketing Ronin system. She straight up told me, in the middle of the call, that she also was guilty of the ‘mad scientist’ approach to running her marketing consultancy. In fact, as soon as I was talking about what I was trying to accomplish she told me that she became guarded until I told her my story: that I was once like her. Suspicious of productivity and hopelessly unorganized.
The simple truth is that marketers may not realize that this approach is ineffectual and retrograde until it’s too late. This is exactly what happened to me – I only started looking for answers after having suffered from burnout twice.
While it was tough and meant that I suffered in terms of output for several months, I now am thankful to have gone through the burnout. It means that I had to embark on a journey of self-reflection, learning, and growth. This is where the Marketing Ronin methodology was born.
While I strongly urge you to check out the Marketing Ronin Methodology and familiarize yourself with some of the basic frameworks that make it up, I also recognize that you might not be at a place in your life where you are ready to commit to a total productivity solution. If that’s the case, read on, I’m going to offer you some tips that could drastically improve your output as a marketer.
Develop a ‘Capture Habit’
You won’t find this habit listed among the 7-Habits of Highly Effective People but it’s nevertheless a crucial habit to form. A Capture Habit entails writing down all of your thoughts, tasks, and projects onto either a digital task manager like Things, OmniFocus, ToDoist, Apple Reminders, Microsoft To-Do, Notion, etc. or (as I prefer it) onto a paper-based system.
Why is this important? Well, your brain is made for having thoughts but not for keeping them. As we evolved in the forests, grasslands, and savannas of Africa we evolved with the ability to keep track of 4-5 things at a time. After all, we evolved with much more immediate, simple concerns like securing food, shelter, water, and avoiding being eaten by a Crocodile or mauled by a Lion.
Neuroscientists have demonstrated that modern humans are still limited by the hardware that our ancestors evolved with. Therefore, it’s important to develop an external system of keeping track of all of life’s modern complexities. A second brain if you will.
Developing a ‘Capture Habit’ takes a bit of time, discipline, and patience. Just start by writing down whatever comes to your mind during the course of your day. Don’t even think about assigning priority yet or anything else. Simply focus, at least for a month or so, on developing the habit of writing everything down. Of course, once written down, I highly suggest taking time aside for reflection and reviewing what thoughts, tasks and projects you ‘captured’ earlier in your day or week.
Minimize Distractions & Foster Deep Work
You don’t have to have been diagnosed with ADHD to struggle with focus and distractions. It seems that just about everything in modern society from emails, slack messages, and meetings, has been designed to distract you from getting things done and refocus your attention away from what matters most.
On average, it takes about 23 minutes for a person to fully regain focus on a task after being distracted, according to a study from the University of California, Irvine. And you know what happens next, right? Boom. Another distraction. It’s no wonder that most knowledge workers feel like they’re stretched to the limit, unable to deal with all of the tasks and requests assigned to them on a daily basis.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. As a marketer, you are responsible for making sure that you are committed only to the tasks that move the needle for your business or that of your client. Every modern smartphone and desktop operating system will allow you to set a daily schedule where distracting notification pop-ups, badges, and pings can be muted or removed completely.
That brings us to the bane of our existence as marketers: the meeting. If you feel like you’re constantly getting bombarded with meeting requests, you need to internalize the fact that you are in control. Saying ‘No’ is a valid option if you think it’s not adding value to either your work or that of your collaborator, client, or boss.
And if saying ‘No’ is too radical for you then you should also know that there’s no reason why a Meeting should be more than 15-30 minutes long. You absolutely do not have to take out as much as half of your day to spend on meetings.
A final note on meetings: I tend to have ‘Meeting Days’ where I cram as many into one as possible. These days are foregone conclusions from a productivity perspective – I know I just won’t get anything done. Better to lump them together than spread them out where they could potentially derail a critical deep work session.
Embrace AI and Automation
Maybe at some point, I’ll do an entire article on my favorite AI and Automation tools. Until then, I want you to take a look at your workflow. What are your areas of focus? What are the repetitive tasks that are mindless and sap your mental energy levels? What could be outsourced or delegated? What could be replaced by automation or AI outright?
These are important questions to ask yourself. Everyone from Napoleon Bonaparte to the cute barista at your local coffee shop is subject to the universal constant of time. The 24-hour day. What you choose to do with that day will make all the difference in whether you are successful or not.
Automation and AI unlock more of your day so you can spend your creative brain power on highly demanding projects. Provided that those projects are worth prioritizing for (see: Veitia Matrices to find out how I prioritize!) then it’d be worth streamlining your workflow as much as possible so you can focus only on tasks that are highly impactful.
