Time management

In the beginning of my career I struggled with time. My calendar dictated my week, and every urgent ping, meeting request, and “quick favour” found a slot. The result? Lots of motion, little impact. Once I applied the concepts in this article—ideas I now teach to junior assistants and CMOs alike—I took back control of my diary and, more importantly, my growth impact.

Your calendar tells a story. If it is packed with shallow meetings and ad-hoc tasks, you’re in survival mode. If it shows deliberate blocks for analysis, creative work, and planned recovery, you’re building growth. A marketer who ignored paid-media spend would be fired—so why ignore the scarcer resource of focused hours? Time management is not about squeezing in more; it is about making room for the work that moves revenue.

Before we optimise, we need the data. Spend one quiet hour reviewing the past three weeks of your calendar (and, if you want a bonus layer of insight, your sent email). Identify days when you made real progress—finished the campaign strategy, wrote that pillar blog—and days when you felt busy but produced nothing tangible.

What to look for

• Best days: What patterns helped? Long morning blocks? Fewer meetings?
• Worst days: Where did time leak? Endless context-switching? Fire-fighting?
• Triggers: Which meetings or tools consistently break flow?
  

Write your observations. Most marketers discover their “busy days” are full of reactive tasks that could wait. Knowing this sets up every improvement that follows.

Create a secondary calendar in Google Calendar called “Ideal Week”. Plot a recurring template: workout time, commute or travel, deep-work sessions, recurring meetings, admin blocks, even lunch. Overlay it on your live diary; each Friday, compare the two. Some weeks will match, others will be chaos, but the overlay keeps your priorities visible.

Think big items first, small items later—the classic jar, rocks, pebbles analogy. Schedule brainstorming for LinkedIn ads, analytics reviews, and content drafting where your energy is highest. Treat the template as an ambitious target; course-correct weekly and update the template as your role evolves.

Add one daily buffer slot labelled “Flex”. Meetings overrun, last-minute briefs appear—build the slack on your terms or live at the mercy of someone else’s. Finally, schedule a fifteen-minute evening wrap-up to review tomorrow’s blocks. A week by design will never survive contact with reality intact, but every week it gets closer to the ideal.

I tell every new team member: the first ninety minutes of your day are sacred. No email, no Slack. Open the day’s most important task and work on it in focus mode. Fires can wait until 10:30. That single habit shifts you from reactive to proactive.

Pair this with timeboxing. Block tasks directly in your calendar (or in a to-do manager with start and end times). A “write campaign brief” block lasts two hours and nothing else lives inside it. Deep work is where marketers create outsized results—strategy documents, creative concepts, insight analyses. If it isn’t blocked, it won’t happen.

After every substantive meeting, schedule fifteen to thirty minutes for follow-up and travel. Use it to:

• Write notes and send agreed actions.
• Update the CRM before details fade.
• Reset your mind before the next task.
  

Buffers keep momentum high and prevent evening admin sprawl. Likewise, if a meeting demands preparation—a slide deck, agenda—block time earlier in the week to build it. Planning work around meetings beats scrambling five minutes before the call.

Time management is not about doing more; it is about reserving time for the work that drives growth and defending it with simple habits:

1. Audit your last three weeks to see reality.
2. Design an Ideal Week template as a north star.
3. Protect deep work with a daily ninety-minute focus block.
4. Buffer every meeting to close loops and maintain momentum.
   

Your calendar should reflect your priorities, not your availability. Even in a micromanaged environment, you can reclaim small pockets of focus—one ninety-minute block at a time—and stack those wins the way you stack conversion lifts in a campaign. If your calendar doesn’t feel like yours, it’s time to take it back and use it to make an impact on growth.