The ONE Thing Successful Marketers Do Daily

The most successful marketing directors all do this ONE thing every day.

It's easy to do and will make managing the stress and chaos so much easier.

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Transcript

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This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Perkin. I've often said that meetings are a terrible waste of time, and I still agree with that. However, there is one meeting that is the most important, the single most valuable meeting that you should be having every single day. And if you don't have this meeting, it makes everything 10 times more difficult and chaotic. And the good news is this is a really short meeting, an easy meeting. It's a meeting with just yourself, which makes it amazing. Today I'm talking about the daily review, the most important meeting that you need on your calendar, and you need to have this every day. And I want to dive into this and tell you why it's so important and how it can help you save time and maintain your sanity so you can actually get everything done and be in control. As a marketing director, you have a ton of stuff going on every single day and every single week. There's things to measure and monitor and manage, and there's new demands and requests coming at you. There's changes to the business. There's a lot of stuff happening. In addition to all the Slack messages and perhaps text messages or emails or phone calls and meetings that you're having, it's impossible to not go crazy as a marketing director. Maybe you can relate to that. And it's really important that we keep everything on track, that we can juggle it all, because that's our job. But doing that is extremely difficult when at the end of the day we're exhausted, we're overwhelmed, and we forget things. Or if during the day we make promises and then we forget about them. And so we have to have a way to deal with this. And that's where the daily review comes in. The daily review is just that, it's a daily meeting with yourself where you block off some time, you set it aside to review what's happened today. And this isn't so much a meditation or reflection, although it could be that, it's more of an organization tool that you want to go back through the things that have happened in the day and make sure you've organized them and categorized them and processed them and plan for tomorrow. And so the daily review helps you in a couple of ways. One, it will help you eliminate the stress that you face every day because we're going to take this time every day and review everything that you've done, organize it, process it, make sure we didn't miss anything, and then use this as a time to plan for tomorrow, to set ourselves up for success tomorrow, to make sure we know the right things and have all the pieces in the right places. So it'll help you keep on track every day and every week so that you can be organized, so that you don't drop balls anymore, and so that you know exactly what's happening and who you need to speak with and what the next step is on every project that you're involved in. And by doing this, it makes you look like the superhero. And actually, I think it makes you feel like a superhero too, because it's a really easy, really short amount of time you can spend every day to have a huge, leveraged result that you won't have the stress or chaos every day and every week. You'll know exactly what's going on, you'll have sent all the right messages to all the right people, you'll know exactly which things to measure and monitor and how to manage all the pieces and projects that are happening. So the daily review is amazing. And this is why I'm so adamant that it is the single most important meeting you have ever. And you need to have it every day, and it's just with yourself. If you don't do this, I guarantee you're going to forget things. You're going to miss things, things will slip through the cracks. This is probably already happening to you right now. And don't feel bad if it is, it happens to all of us. But that's why the daily review is so important. Because without it in place, things will get missed. You have a lot of meetings every day and messages every day, and it's easy to forget something or to get distracted by the latest fire that someone has called you into. In addition, without a daily review, without a process, a way to keep things on track, you're going to be constantly behind. Because every day there's so much stuff coming at you and so much to think about that it's overwhelming. And without taking the time for yourself to reflect and to reorganize all these things, you will be constantly behind. If not feeling constantly behind, then actually being behind. And this is a big deal because without the daily review, you end up in a hole and you end up just digging deeper and deeper. And it's harder to get out of that hole. This is why we have to stop and pause and step back every day and say, what do we do? What's going on? And how do we organize this? How do we make sense of it for today and for tomorrow? So let me give you some practical application here. How do you do this? And let me walk you through the steps of creating your daily review and then using it so you can get everything on track, eliminate the stress, and be the most productive possible. First, you need to pick a time, obviously. And it's really important, I think, that it's the same time every day. And so for me, it's the end of the day. For you, it doesn't have to be, but I recommend it's the end of the day. Which means go to your calendar and look at the week, this week, next week, the week after, and find a time that you can consistently block off for yourself. You don't need a bunch of time, but I recommend at least 30 minutes to block off. Maybe that's three o'clock for you. Maybe it's 4 30. Maybe it's 9 a.m. Whatever it is, find a block of time and block it off and call it your daily review. Also note here, it is essential that on your calendar, this is marked as busy or blocked or unavailable, whatever your calendar system calls it. In other words, do not let people schedule meetings during the time of your daily review. That would defeat the purpose of this. So find a time on your calendar right now. Pause this if you need to. Go find a time that's available for you every day and block it off. And if you don't have a time that's available every day, you can alternate this. Maybe your schedule's different. So maybe Monday, Wednesday, Friday it needs to be at one time, and Tuesday, Thursday it needs to be a different time. That's okay, but it's even better if it's the same time every day, if you can move things to make that possible. So the first step here is to find a time and block it off. The second step is to get your stuff ready, get organized. So figure out what are you going to do in the daily review? I'll give you some thoughts, and this will vary based on your situation, but in general, we want to look through your email. We want to identify any top priority, urgent emails. This isn't a time to do your email. This is a time to handle the important stuff that you've missed, or to just go through your inbox and identify the things that need to be actioned for tomorrow. I want to repeat that because it's very important. The daily review is not a time to do work. It's a time to plan, to organize. And so you I don't want you going through email to reply to things. You go through email to see what did you miss and what needs to be actioned for tomorrow. You can also review your calendar. It's really helpful at the end of the day or in your daily review to go back through what events, what meetings did you have yesterday, what meetings did you have today, and what meetings do you have coming up tomorrow. And if you spend even just two minutes looking at that, you'll remember some things, some important notes or topics that happened in those meetings, and you'll be able to think about the next steps of those meetings. Today we met and talked about this, so tomorrow we need to do that. So spend a few minutes in your daily review looking at your calendar. So we have email, we have calendar, look at Slack and any other places that you get messages. Slack, Teams, Text, whatever it is, wherever you get messages, make sure you look at those and process them. Again, we're not replying to them. We're just going through and seeing which things did we miss, which messages need actioning for tomorrow. So we have your communication covered, which is all the messages and all the meetings. The next thing is your projects. What did you do today? What got done and what didn't get done? So look at your project management tool or your task list. Maybe you have a piece of paper on your desk, whatever it is, and say, what did you set out to do today? And what did you actually get done? And make sure those things are checked off or update any next steps there. But also look at the things that you didn't get done and just ask yourself why. Was it you didn't have enough time? Did you get distracted? Was there a challenge or you didn't have what you needed from someone? Just make a mental note and then again organize it. Set the next step, plan for tomorrow for the rest of the week, and update anything that needs to be updated there with the notes, with the files, with the action items. This is one of the main benefits of having the daily review is not only to organize your meetings and messages, but also to make sure you can get your projects and tasks on track. There are many other things you can do in your daily review, but for 80% of you, these are the two main things meetings and messages, and projects and tasks. Master that first. And then once you've developed that habit, once you're doing your daily review every single day for two or three weeks, then you can add some more things to it. Then you can make it even better. And this will become for you the most valuable, most important meeting that you have every single day. And you'll find that it is enjoyable, that you look forward to it because it's almost a reward to look back and say, What have I done? And let me spend some time that I really desperately need to get everything on track, to be organized, and to plan for tomorrow. Planning is key to success in anything. And right now, if you don't have the time or the space or the process to plan for tomorrow, to plan for this week and next week, then you desperately need it. And the daily review will, dare I say, be life changing for you if you set up the time, block it off, and spend it planning and preparing to get the most out of every single day.