Time management

Most B2B marketers I meet can reel off every ad metric yet still close Friday feeling as if the real work never surfaced. I used to be the same—toggling between campaign tweaks, Slack pings, and rushed stand-ups—until I realised that no growth strategy can outrun a chaotic week. After fifteen years of building growth engines I have learnt that the difference between a frantic sprint and a calm, compounding rhythm is a handful of time-management fundamentals. This chapter sticks to those basics. No colour-coded pomodoro hacks, no exotic apps—just the minimum viable structure that lets you lock the week’s wins by Thursday, walk out at 16:00 on Friday, and bank an extra seven-and-a-half focus hours for the projects that move your career. Imagine launching a product-marketing campaign on Monday, seeing first-touch leads by Wednesday, and still having clear headspace to map next quarter’s playbook before the week ends. That is the payoff of mastering these foundations.

Start with a personal time audit and keep it brutally simple. For one typical week capture every block of activity—meetings, email, ad-hoc chats, creative work, admin. The fastest way is to create a secondary ‘Time audit’ calendar in Google Calendar, then drag each finished task into its slot. Because the calendar is separate you can toggle it on and off and colleagues will never see the data; you stay honest without broadcasting your learning curve. At week’s end open the calendar side-by-side with your main one and note two numbers: total deep-work hours and total context-switches. Anything that is neither strategic nor mandatory becomes your first batch of deletions. The point is not a forensic spreadsheet; it is a rapid X-ray that shows where your best attention leaks away so you can redirect it next Monday.

With the leaks exposed, sketch an ideal-week calendar. Block your highest-energy hours—usually the first ninety minutes of each morning—for your most leveraged work: positioning docs, growth analyses, campaign narratives. Treat those blocks like client calls: fixed, named, and protected. Next, add two short inbox windows, one late morning and one late afternoon, so stakeholders learn that you reply in predictable bursts rather than on demand. Front-load deliverables so that major outputs land by Thursday; visible progress quiets end-of-week panic and shifts the team’s focus from presence to outcomes. Because everything lives in one personal operating system—tasks, calendar, and priorities—your mental tabs drop to zero. The template itself is mundane, yet the discipline of honouring it forces compounding gains.

Deep work and time-boxing turn that template into throughput. Every day I begin with a ninety-minute focus block before opening any inbox. Later I ring-fence thirty-minute pockets for email triage, end-of-day closure, and Friday’s weekly planning. Once those basics feel natural you can graduate to a cadence I now rely on: ninety minutes deep, thirty minutes open, ninety minutes deep, repeating through the day. It keeps me effectively offline for most of the time, which is how I can ship guides like this one while steering multiple growth programmes ;-) Each focus block carries a single objective written in the calendar invite so there is no fuzziness when the timer starts. Micro-sprints inside the block—commit, produce, review—create a self-contained unit of progress that survives interruptions elsewhere.

Finally, protect buffer time or the whole structure collapses. After any meeting that is likely to spawn actions—a marketing sync, a quarterly review—immediately block the thirty minutes that follow. While the discussion is still fresh you can assign tasks, capture decisions, and clear your head before the next commitment. The buffer also stops other meetings bleeding into scarce focus time. Apply the same principle to deadlines: if a campaign asset is due on Thursday, set the task date in your system to Wednesday. The artificial day’s grace absorbs overruns without eating Friday. I add a standing ‘fire break’ on Thursday afternoon so any late-stage emergencies land in a predefined slot instead of hijacking the evening. Do not forget travel time; block doorway-to-doorway, not just the meeting itself, so the calendar tells the truth about availability.

A quick recap. Audit one week to spot the drains, design an ideal calendar that respects energy peaks, enforce daily deep-work and time-boxing, and defend buffers around meetings, deadlines, and travel. None of this is flashy, yet together these four basics convert hours into visible results that earn trust while giving you back your Fridays. Run the experiment next week, measure how many mission-critical items are finished by Thursday, and decide for yourself. Boundary beats hustle, habits improve through small tests, one clear operating system trumps scattered tools, and progress—documented in the calendar—outshines any green-dot presence. Master these foundations and the advanced tactics online will feel optional rather than urgent.