How efficient are you as a marketer? Are you really getting the most out of your time? Give your time management skills a boost with these tips.
Are you one of those always busy, hard-working and extremely motivated marketers? Always on the lookout for inspiring marketing news, never miss a tweet and checking your real-time visitors during dinner when your partner’s not looking? Good. Join the club!
But how are doing in terms of efficiency? Are you really making the most out of your time? Use these hacks to become a time management expert.
Depending on how your team is organized, you might have a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly marketing agenda with tasks, campaigns and deadlines. Try managing your personal time at work with a daily to-do list: it will keep you focussed and help you get a grip on your bigger to-do list. Don’t delete the ‘done’ part of your list: looking at what you’ve already accomplished is a lot more motivating than having all those unchecked boxes staring at you all day.
It’s not a secret: inefficient meetings are a huge waste of time. To make your meetings more efficient, set a clear agenda and make sure everyone knows the agenda and has results, questions, ideas ready before the meeting starts. Also determine what you want to achieve at the end of the meeting: ‘This needs to be decided on’ or ‘We’re solving that problem’. As a marketer you’re used to settings goals and tracking ROI anyway, so you might as well apply it to meetings.
We marketers want to stay connected all the time and have browser and mobile notifications on 24/7 — guilty as charged — but what if you really need that one annoying, focused task done? Just do it. Go offline. Turn off those notifications. No, you won’t be denied access to Twitter because it took you 2 hours to retweet something instead of your usual 3 min.
Don’t let time spent in lines, on public transport and in waiting rooms go to waste. Use it to catch up on the latest Tweets or Instagram posts, read or save articles for later, answer emails or plan your work for tomorrow.
Sports, what does that have to do with marketing? Not much. Exercise does, however, get your mind off things and help you handle stress. Plus, it’s perfect time for an inner brainstorm. I personally have my half-hour bike commute to thank for solving tricky marketing issues, finding perfect ad copy and coming up with the craziest growth hack ideas I ever had.
Your calendar can do more than just tell you when your next meeting is: for each meeting, add the address, name, phone and email of the person you’re meeting with. For parties or events you can even add the dress code, a link to your e-ticket, etc. It will spare you the last-minute rush through your email, messenger app or where did we have that conversation again? and you will (finally) arrive on time.
Just like exercise, breaks can do wonders to your productivity, so add regular breaks to your planning. Take a breath of fresh air, have some coffee, do a couple of jumping jacks, ask your colleague about his date last night, make a joke and — worst case — use them as a buffer for your unrealistically tight marketing schedule. Or don’t.
Interested to know why Husky can be an asset for your tasks as well?
Read more about marketing tasks here, or book your online demo.
