Three Time Management Techniques to Meet Your Strategic Goals | DemandLab

The final step is to turn this new, streamlined approach into a repeatable process so that you stay focused and on track day after day.

Create a repeating daily or weekly task for yourself and your team to find items that have snuck onto your task lists or changed priority that you can now Drop, Delegate, or Delay. One of the tools Karl shares with his agency clients is a “Top 5 Daily Checklist”. It helps you outline today’s top five tasks to work on, in priority order, along with some smaller items that are easier to complete and may be unrelated to the priority task. After completing one of the top fives, you can take a break and then turn to a smaller task or two to give you a sense of accomplishment.

For example, if one marketing strategy you would like to implement is to build out a customer nurture, then one of the top five daily tasks could be to pull a list of current content available to support a customer nurture. Once that’s completed, you might grab a coffee and then make a few calls or answer an email or two. Then, you can move on to task number two and repeat the process.

Breaking up the bigger, more challenging tasks with little breaks and smaller tasks is a great way to stay focused and motivated throughout the day.

As you have probably noticed, this is not a one and done process. It’s a continuous approach to building in time to work on long-term priorities. When you first implement these steps, you may find it hard not to slip back into daily firefighting mode. If that’s your current habit, after a couple of weeks …(or months), you’ll find that you’ve started chipping away at the bigger goals.

Our team is using the task management system, Asana, to support these techniques. We use projects to track our quarterly goals, create lists for weekly agendas, and enable each person to manage their daily tasks. It’s helping us stay on track with our daily work as well as provide a structure to meet our long-term goals.

If you need guidance in meeting your strategic marketing goals we’d love to talk with you. Our focus is on providing the right tools and expertise to support your marketing and revenue goals.