Project Management for Marketers Who Hate Project Management

I must begin with a confession: I am a project management hater. Ever since college, when I really began encountering projects that required some level of management, I’ve resisted the conventional wisdom that says it’s a good idea to organize your work. Setting to-do lists, breaking up complex tasks into smaller ones, delegating — why would I, a relatively intelligent Virgo with a keen eye for detail, need to do all that?

I know I’m not alone. Many digital marketers seem to have a similar aversion to time and task management, not because we don’t recognize its value, but because it feels like it gets in the way of our “real” work. With so many hats to wear and what usually feels like too little time in the day, it’s not super appealing to spend the first hour of a project working on something other than the project itself. Plus, we tend to be creative-minded, right-brained people. Time and task management feels tedious, boring, and counter to the impulse to brain dump our big ideas all over our screens.

Embracing Time & Task Management

Like it or not, project management skills are an absolute must-have for digital marketers. No matter your work environment, but especially if you’re at an agency, the amount of individual concerns we deal with day to day is enormous. We juggle deadlines, competing technical demands, team collaborations, and our own creative bursts constantly, and it’s incredibly easy for things to fall through the cracks. Even if you fancy yourself a natural Rolodex like I do, project management provides transparency and accountability for the rest of your team — and lets your boss know you’re really on top of things.

Time and task management are career builders, as well. The next time you’re looking for samples of your work to show to a prospective employer, you’ll thank your former self for thoroughly documenting your tasks and demonstrating how long it should reasonably take to complete a large project. If and when you end up managing a team, helping your direct reports with their own task organization will make their lives easier and ensure you’re running an efficient department.

Most importantly, it’s the best stress reliever I know. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened my calendar in a panic, only to let out a deep sigh when I see that I did in fact set aside time to worry about Client X on Thursday and therefore don’t need to freak out about their problems today.

Project Management Tips for Digital Marketers

Below, I’ll list some of the practices I’ve adopted and explain how they work for me. If you’re resistant to project management, give yourself a gift: Try out at least one of these tips for about a month. If you hate it, stop doing it. But I bet you’ll find yourself breathing a little easier.

Take Advantage of Calendar Blocking

I don’t know how I ever functioned without calendar blocks. I use a colour-coded system to block off specific chunks of time dedicated to work tasks, heads-down writing or brainstorming, and of course, meetings. An average week looks something like this, where meetings are blue, client work is yellow, non-client tasks are purple, and gray and burgundy are my and my team’s personal time:

It might seem hectic at first glance, but the fact that there’s a time slot for everything actually makes my life much less hectic. I don’t have to find time for urgent tasks at the last minute, because I know exactly what hours I have available during the week. I can say no when I need to, and teammates can see when I’m free and what items are flexible. I keep my calendar updated in real time so that I know exactly how long it took me to complete something, which allows me to make better predictions in the future.

When I block off time for a particular task, I use the description field to add links to any docs in progress or other resources I might need — this keeps me from needing to dig through Google Drive when I’m ready to start working. When a meeting involves other people, and especially if it’s recurring, I use the meeting notes option to set an agenda. As pertinent thoughts come to me throughout the preceding days, I add them to that agenda right away rather than waiting until five minutes before the meeting to try and remember everything I wanted to discuss.

While I try not to micromanage, I do discourage my team from setting the same generic work blocks every day or every week. Some tasks may genuinely be recurring, but designating Monday, say, to focus on Client X vs. completing smaller items for Clients Y and Z on Tuesday allows them to free up mental space for the task at hand. Being able to compartmentalize like this is the best gift I’ve ever given myself at work — I can set aside thinking or worrying about any tasks that aren’t scheduled for the present moment because I know I have time dedicated to think about them later.

Use Best Practices for Project Management Tools

I wouldn’t say I’m close personal friends with Asana. Tools that are specifically designed for project management tend to spark my anti-PM rebellion fairly hard. But I do love checking items off a list, and within an agency setting, some tool of this kind is a must-have for collaboration.

Most project management tools will at least automatically organize your tasks by deadline, with the most urgent tasks appearing at the top of the list. But without some subcategorization on the user’s part, the “My Tasks” tab in Asana can become a jumbled mess very easily.

I organize the My Tasks view by client and/or project, creating new sections for each task grouping. If a particular client or task deadline is approaching soon, I’ll drag and drop that section closer to the top of my list. This tends to create a kind of rotation, where the client I’m meeting with next shows at the top of my list and then moves down to the bottom of the rotation after the meeting has passed.

When I’m working on a project that has a final deadline and several milestones leading up to it, I set that final date and work backwards to determine the date associated with each milestone. For example, if I know I want to have a client’s content published on-site by the 31st, I might require their final approval by the 27th, plan to have a draft sent over by the 20th, have an outline for that draft created and approved by the 13th, and finish keyword research by the 6th. Planning the month in advance with my calendar blocks open in an adjacent tab, I can easily tell exactly how much time I’ll need to reach each milestone.

Just as I’ve added links to working docs in my calendar blocks, I make sure to include any resources that I or a collaborator might need within Asana task descriptions. I also tag any potential collaborators or overseers in each task, to ensure they have full visibility into my processes and won’t need to come to me with questions.

Use Your Inbox & Browser Tabs as a To-Do List

You may be noticing a trend here: At least for me, project management mostly means putting things into their own nice, neat boxes. When it comes to my email account, which would be a bottomless pit of sales pitches and Asana notifications if I didn’t clear it out frequently, the “boxes” principle is more important than ever.

I’m absolutely an inbox zero person, which means I’m not fully concern-free unless my inbox is fully empty. This allows my inbox to function as a to-do list of sorts — if something is sitting there, that means I still need to deal with it. Most often, the messages I allow to sit in my inbox are ones I need to reply to, ones that contain information pertinent to a task I need to complete, or links to Google Docs I need to work on.

If I’m truly finished with a doc or an Asana task, I’m comfortable deleting the email related to it. Otherwise, I organize anything I might need to reference later into folders. I have one, labeled with the name of my company, for org-wide emails and hiring concerns. I have one that contains external opportunities, like replies to conference pitches or emails from potential corporate partners. And then I have an overarching “Clients & Prospects” folder that contains messages between our sales team and potential clients, plus subfolders for each existing client.

I treat my browser tabs in much the same way. If I have a tab open, it’s because it contains something I still need to think about or deal with. Even though I tend to have a ton of concurrent concerns occupying my mental space at any given time, I keep my open tabs to a manageable number by taking advantage of the tips listed above — I add links to any docs and web pages I might need to reference when I create calendar blocks and Asana tasks. Having those links available in other places allows me to close those tabs and work from a less cluttered environment.

I curate my browser bookmarks similarly to the way I organize email subfolders. There’s a folder for all client site logins, and the rest of my bookmarks bar forms a prioritized list based on how frequently I use each link and what type of site it is.

---

Personally, I’ve found these initiatives easy enough to implement in my day-to-day work because they’re all relatively minor tweaks. I still consider myself a fairly table-stakes project manager, but even adopting these basic methods of organization, prioritization, and interlinking has made an enormous difference to my stress levels and ability to keep tasks above water.

If you’ve been as reluctant in your career as I have to comply with project management best practices, I hope at least some of these tips will feel manageable and maybe even find their way into your regular operations.
Here’s an opportunity for you to get involved. We want to know your project management tips. How do you stay organised? What tools do you use? How do you make project management interesting?

RankSuite and I are putting together a huge list of your advice. So, if you want to be featured in an article, submit your tips!