As a marketer you know the importance of a marketing audit: you need to take an in-depth view to your activities to shape your marketing strategies and tactics. But do you do the same with yourself? Do you focus on commitment? Do you seek knowledge? How do you make the journey fun to yourself? How do you get rid of any stagnating and negative thoughts? How do you get rid of distractions? Do you rely on others or yourself?
You are much more than just a marketer who does advertising.
You’re a marketing professional who can have a bigger impact on the overall success of the business through your experience, knowledge, and strategies. Own that. Get to understand other departments in your business on a deeper level and how you can have a more positive influence on their success by learning from them and integrating what you find out in your marketing.
The biggest challenges to optimal performance and success nowadays are information overload, distractions and multitasking. So you need to avoid the overwhelm that comes from those kinds of stressful elements by prioritizing and systemizing your tasks. This will free up the necessary mental resources to be calm, focusing harder on what’s important, and become more productive.
Here are the 3 overall steps to enhancing your work performance:
1. PRIORITIZE:
- How do you know in which order to do things?
- Which of your goals are most relevant?
- What’s working well for you at the moment?
- What should you focus on more in the next week or month?
- How do you identify and ignore the “noise”?
- How do you find clarity when there’s too much to do?
Please work on gaining that clarity: write down all the goals you have for the next month and prioritize them. When you clearly prioritize your work, you can increase productivity, better manage your time, and feel confident that you’ll hit your deadlines.
Knowing how to prioritize work affects the success of your project, the engagement of your team, and your role as a powerful marketer.
Use The Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize your tasks on the basis of their urgency. It helps to determine the activities which are important and the ones which do not deserve your attention at all.
- Urgent and important: These are time-critical key activities without which your performance or the business will suffer. You have to DO them right now. So put these items in your calendar. Do not allow anything else to steal your time or focus until you’re finished.
- Important, but not urgent: Important activities that are not time-critical, but should still be done as soon as possible because they’re critical for your business success. You don’t have to decide if you do them; you have to. The decision is when it is best to do them. So what is the action here? You have to PLAN: schedule them into your calendar. Be determined to make this decision in less than 6 minutes. Otherwise you may never quite finish planning for it, and then it won’t happen.
- Urgent, but not important: The so-called “fires” that keep appearing and stealing your attention by needing to be put out. If possible, DELEGATE the time-sensitive tasks. Determine who is your best bet — even though this person might not be the ideal candidate. Decide how you are going to communicate and train that person to carry out the project or task. And agree to a time frame for that person to complete the task and report how progress is coming along.
- Neither important or urgent: These are the nice-to-have activities that should be done whenever there’s time. You can leave them on a piece of paper as a reminder, but DELETE them from your to-do list. Most of the time, when the item is neither important nor urgent, you can simply get it off your mind. Let it go.
2. FOCUS
Focus on productively solving the task at hand, and nothing else. Get rid of distractions and do the task during the time period that you’ve set aside and marked in your calendar. This means you cultivate your skill to selectively concentrate on one aspect of your environment while ignoring all other things. This ability also requires work on some other qualities, such as persistence, patience, consistent practice, and others.
Dr. Paul Hammerness and Margaret Moore, authors of Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life say that multitasking increases the chances of making mistakes and missing critical information and elements.
Multitaskers seem to lose information in their working memory, and also experience a loss in their creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving.
So, you need to get clear up front about what you’re NOT gonna do, so you can focus more on what you actually do. Remember – if you let all the noise in, you will never find your own voice!
3. COMMUNICATE SYSTEMATICALLY
Being a marketer, you should be giving monthly marketing overviews to your bosses and maybe colleagues. If you’re not doing this already, you should make that into a habit. Because when you do that, the people in your company will see and understand in time that you are serious about business. Not only will they admire your professionalism, but you’ll be keeping them on track of your collective goals and instill a sense of collective responsibility. Put another way: if I see that everybody is working for the same goal, then I feel a certain incitement to act like the others, because I don’t want to feel left outside, and I’d feel guilty if I didn’t contribute. As you get feedback from doing this, your colleagues might bring up new ideas which can change priorities. And that’s okay! The important thing is that by doing this, you’re making sure that your company’s marketing is constantly moving forward, and that it’s not just stagnating.
“Talent in marketing creates great campaigns. But intelligence and teamwork across all departments in the company creates long term success.”
Powerful Marketer Program
Ask yourself, am I just kinda hoping to be successful at the next meeting all the time? Or would I rather be a powerful marketer for my entire career? Because if it’s the latter, you need to understand the difference between the day-to-day tasks that only give you little, short-term accomplishments, and, conversely, those tasks that will give you huge long-term success.
As you are a powerful marketer, please bear in mind that:
- By planning & auditing you are minimizing marketing risks for the company.
- By communicating & using information you hold the strongest weapon. Be wise in choosing, collecting, sorting, and applying information. This will help you to minimize misunderstandings.
- By prioritizing & focusing you affect your own success. YOU are the only cause of all distractions. Set yourself to ‘do not disturb’ mode and give yourself the superpower of focus.
And when your next project is up, simply make a clean cut, take a short break, and shift your attention from one priority and focus to the next. Close any loose ends that you can close instantly, and if there’s too many of them, and it’s not urgent, just let it go. Enhancing your success requires work on many qualities, such as persistence, patience, consistent practice, and others.
But the power of prioritizing, focusing and communicating makes you more creative and helps you deliver better, and more detailed work with fewer mistakes on a more consistent basis. It all affects the success of your project, the engagement of your team, and your role as a powerful marketer.
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