Marketing Profs

Ever sigh to yourself, "There just aren't enough hours in the day!"? You're not alone. Most marketers are overloaded and under-resourced. But it doesn't have to be that way.

And managing your time more efficiently isn't the answer.

You may remember my article about outsourcing your life, which features an interview with Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling book The Four-Hour Workweek. The article revealed how you can hire a virtual assistant (VA) for as little as five dollars per hour and delegate many of the items on your to-do list to that VA in order to save you time and boost your productivity.

Delegating isn't the only key to reducing your workload and your stress level, however. You also need to be discerning about what you take on: Not everything deserves to go on your to-do list.

Even more importantly, some things deserve to be on your list that aren't there now. I'm talking about career goals, or life goals.

When was the last time you prioritized your "to-do" list based on what will help further your marketing career instead of merely what will get you through your week? Do you have things on that list that you'd like to have accomplished one year from now? Or in five years?

I sat down for a podcast interview with best-selling author David Allen, the guru of the productivity methodology known as "GTD" (which stands for Getting Things Done and is also the name of his New York Times Best-Seller). We discussed life and time management, and the psychology behind why so many of us struggle with accomplishing what we want in our careers and in our personal lives.

I have already written about GTD for MarketingProfs—an article titled "Clearing the Clutter: How Busy Marketers Can Get Things Done. In it, I wrote:

Once you stop using your brain as the holding tank for all the important things that you need to do today, tomorrow, next week, or even further into the future, the sooner you become clear and your mind will be open to wander, unfettered. Only then can your creativity truly be unleashed, and you reach a state of flow that David Allen refers to as "Mind like water."

"Mind like water" is a pretty foreign concept to many marketers and professionals because of the way we've trained ourselves to think about our day. Daily to-do lists, constant phone and email interruptions, and other minutiae bog us down and distract us. The "mind like water" simile originated from the martial arts but can be applied to business because it describes a state of mind where the little things don't get to you.