Is nailing your marketing on your to-do list but somehow you never quite get around to it? 

I’m not talking about posting a few images on Facebook, but the real nitty-gritty of marketing – tackling those big tasks like starting an email list or understanding promoted pins on Pinterest or finally getting to grips with Facebook ads. 

The marketing wish list is long, right? And long means overwhelming. And overwhelming means that you actually end up doing nothing and focusing instead on what’s directly in front of you, whether that’s your editing pile or replying to client emails. 

Too often, the things that would make a big difference to your business end up getting pushed to the bottom of the pile and marked ‘someday’.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Pareto Principle, most commonly known as the 80/20 rule. You can apply it to all sorts of situations. 

Eg. 

20% of your friends account for 80% of your happiness

20% of your business activity accounts for 80% of your revenue

When it comes to marketing activity, that certainly applies. If you spent even 10% of your time on marketing your business, then I’m confident that you’d see a shift in profitability. 

I’m talking from experience here. It took me a long time to understand how important it is to schedule time for marketing into my monthly and weekly diary, and make sure that those times are set in stone. 

The thing is, I used to think I was really organised. I would start the week with a really long list of things I needed to do, all in priority order. Sounds organised, right? But a long list is just a big mountain of work, looming over you and adding to the feeling of pressure. 

Really, I was just ploughing through my list and hoping for the best. The result? I still felt a little out of control and would get easily distracted. Then, when I got to the end of my working week, inevitably I’d feel I had failed, because I would never get everything done. 

To be honest, it was a difficult period because I felt like my business wasn’t making the progress it deserved to, even though I was working as hard as I possibly could. I knew something had to change and if you feel any of the following, then you might be ready for a change too…

• You’re wearing all of the hats in your business – editor, accountant, marketer, creative…
• You’re too busy working IN your business to work ON your business
• You’re worried you’ll forget something important
• Your to-do list doesn’t get any shorter
• You struggle to switch off
• You feel guilty for taking time away from your business

If that describes you and your business, I’m going to share my productivity system with you now.

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1. SCHEDULE EVERYTHING

For me, scheduling is the key to massively increasing productivity. And the most important by-product of scheduling everything is that it completely eliminates guilt and anxiety. 

When your to-do list is assigned to specific times, you no longer have to worry about letting someone down or forgetting something. And when your time is free, it’s truly free. Planning your schedule of work will open up blocks of time that you’ve never had before, for learning, for implementing and for goal-setting in your business. 

Obviously, part of this is making an agreement with yourself that you will embrace that important ‘20%’ and do the marketing activities you’ve scheduled, even if that kind of work isn’t your favourite thing. 

The good thing is that now you’ll have time to do it properly instead of squeezing it into your day on the fly.

2. SET UP A BRAIN DUMP

The brain dump is a bucket or letterbox area where you can mentally park action points that pop up during the day, so that you know you aren’t going to forget them. ‘Dumping’ them means you’re definitely going to deal with them later, or schedule them in, but you aren’t going to interrupt your planned time to do them right now. 

This will take away any anxiety you feel about forgetting something, but when time quite literally is money, you can’t afford to get distracted.

3. CHOOSE YOUR SCHEDULING WEAPON

You could use a notebook for planning (although I personally don’t think that’s the best way) or you could use a simple app. 

I use a free app called Todoist alongside my Apple calendar (Google Calendar works perfectly too.) You’ll see from the screenshot how I use the Inbox area as my brain dump. At the beginning and end of every day, I give each task a date and file it in the appropriate folder on the left, clearing down to inbox zero. 

This means that I can click on ‘Today’ and focus only on what’s in front of me.

As soon as a task has a date, it gets pushed through to my Apple Calendar. 

Every morning, I give each task a specific time, meaning that I can easily identify the blocks of free time I have available to schedule things that are important, but not urgent, which might include research, learning something new or getting out of the office to exercise (yes, I schedule that too!).

You can see how my day typically looks in my calendar – a mix of client work, social media, strategic marketing activity and personal time.

It’s just as important to schedule personal activities alongside work tasks to make sure you aren’t over-committing yourself. 

4. BREAK DOWN BIGGER TASKS

The final piece of the puzzle is to break down bigger tasks into manageable chunks. Large projects – whether it’s editing a wedding or building a website – can seem overwhelming. Even if it’s over the course of a day, I like to break down big jobs into steps in my daily calendar. For example, I might break a website build down into ‘Design home page in Illustrator’, ‘Build out gallery pages’ etc.

Task breakdown reassures you that you are making progress and eliminates the guilt you feel when you take a break. 

Taking control of your schedule is an important step to taking control of your business and productivity. I’ve found it transformational and I hope you will too.

If you would like to see a video walk-through of my scheduling tools, you can watch here: https://themarketingfix.co/fix-1-productivity/

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If you’d like to find out more about marketing smarter, come and join me at https://themarketingfix.co