The Monkey and The Marketer

This post is dedicated to my dear colleague Abi Stern, with thanks for the discussion that inspired it...
One of the major battles for many marketers is finding enough time for high value activities amongst the sea of humdrum day to day duties, often in support of other business functions and away from their core focus.

We affectionately term this "monkey work"; its not difficult, just time consuming. This is also an affectionate nod to Ken Blanchard's book The One Minute Manager Meets The Monkey, which is ace if you haven't read it. So how do we ensure our monkey time is managed and we have enough hours left to be marketers?

1) Make sure you know who else could perform the task - sure, as a marketer you're a master at your CRM system but does that mean you're the only one with access? Your automatic adoption of tasks without asking who should really do them and whether the responsibility could be shared will lead to too much monkey business and not enough marketing.



2) Make a habit of saying no or not now occasionally - if you allocate certain blocks of time in which you can complete these tasks and stick to them, you'll naturally push back on people's so called "urgent" requests and you'll be amazed how many turn out not to be urgent or how easily the person finds another way to do whatever it is they wanted you to do.



3) Be sure to understand the purpose of the activity - I've been asked to analyse different things in our business more times than I care to count and often when I ask what the information will be used for I get a pretty lame "oh, I just thought it'd be interesting to know". So ask the question, because prioritising other people's idle curiosity is unlikely to be your smartest move.

 Anyone got any other tips they'd like to share?