Capturing Marketing Productivity in a Sea of Distractions

Walk into any bookstore and you’ll find an entire section of books dedicated to productivity. Run a search for “productivity” on Google and you’ll be directed to hundreds of blogs that promise to teach you how to enhance your focus. Attend an industry conference and you’ll hear much of the same. It’s everywhere around us – in every facet of life and business.

But if you work in marketing, sometimes you need to hear it from someone who is actually in your shoes – a marketer who understands the complexities and distractions that come with working in such a dynamic field.

The Secret to Marketing Productivity

The biggest challenge with maximizing productivity in the world of marketing is that there are so many distractions holding you back. The nature of your job means you spend your time immersed in search engines, social media platforms, blogs, and websites. Add email, texts, and the internal demands of your business and productivity can seem overwhelmingly elusive.

Productivity can’t be the only objective. After all, productivity without creativity is worthless in this field. That being said, it’s a necessary component of success. And if you and your team want to make the most of your time, there are some specific steps you must follow.

1. Schedule One Fake Meeting Per Day

How much time do meetings take up in your daily schedule? Many marketers spend upwards of 20 percent of their time on conference calls and in boardrooms. And if you aren’t careful, these meetings can leave you without any time to accomplish the tasks you need to get done.

While you never want to blatantly mislead others, you may find it helpful to schedule at least one fake meeting per day. This is simply a period of time – 30 to 60 minutes – where you block off your schedule and ignore all external distractions. Use this time to accomplish things on your to-do list and work distraction-free.

2. Do an Hour of Work on Sunday Evening

The weekends are for relaxing and recharging, but there’s nothing worse than returning to work on Monday morning and having an endless stream of tasks on your to-do list. It gets your week off to a bad start and heightens your feelings of stress and anxiety.

One productivity hack successful marketers use is to sit down and do an hour of work at home on Sunday afternoon or evening (and not a minute more). This is a small enough window of time that you don’t feel like you’re wasting your weekend, but a large enough block that you can get things in order before the week starts. You’ll thank yourself when you get to the office on Monday.

3. Learn Keyboard Shortcuts

As entrepreneur John Rampton points out, internet users between the ages of 18 and 24 spend an average of 1,979 minutes online per month. As a marketer, you’re spending even more time online, professionally and personally.

“With that in mind, it makes sense to learn keyboard shortcuts and touch type so that you can save some time when browsing online,” Rampton suggests. One of his leading time management tips is to use tools like “hacks” for Office 365 Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, and Google Calendar to streamline mundane processes.

4. Find a Communication Tool You Like

A large portion of your job as a marketer is communication – with your team, your clients, and your audience. Finding a collaborative tool that allows you to communicate free of distraction is key.

“Communication apps like Slack bring all your communication together in one place, providing real-time messaging, archiving, search, file sharing, downloading, call functionality and much more,” B2B Marketing Lab explains. “Slack offers a viable alternative to numerous solutions for each of the individual applications above, meaning teams spend less time hopping between apps and tools and more time working together.”

5. Block Out Social Media Distractions

You’re forced to spend a lot of time on social media, but this doesn’t mean you have to constantly be victimized by distractions. When it comes to Facebook, there are tools that let you block the distracting elements – such as your news feed – while still keeping the functional parts you need to do your job. News Feed Eradicator is one such solution.

Take Control of Your Time

Time is a finite resource. And even though you can’t make any more of it, you can do a better job of utilizing the 24 hours you get each day. For marketing productivity, the key is to block out distractions and improve efficiency. In doing so, you’ll pave the way for better results.