I'm a marketing manager who has I have been doing a great job of managing all of my responsibilities in the work day, but would love tips on staying organized.
Quick view of my role: Meetings all day, management of various teams for respective projects, launch of marketing/sales tool and the onboarding training, spearheading my team's marketing planning efforts for the upcoming fiscal year.
Thanks!Any tips on how you stay organized within a hectic, ever changing work environment?This may not be doable in your case, but I try to get to work at least an hour ahead of the rest of my staff. I use this time to organize my day and the daily work schedule into two categories:
1. Work due by end of day
2. Work due by end of week
Sometimes, dates or projects will have to move because a more important project will suddenly arise. That's just the nature of our business. But I find that if look at everything that is going on on a daily basis, it's a lot easier to stay on top of things and to identify situations that may jeopardize deadlines or budgets ahead of time.
Another thing I do is a maintain a Weekly Production Schedule (produced as an Excel document), which I review with my staff every Monday and Thursday. Monday's meeting is basically to provide everyone a look at the week ahead and Thursday's meeting is to make sure we are going to meet all assignments due by the end of the week. The Weekly Production Schedule lists all jobs by category:
Catalogs
Sales Collateral
POP
Magazine Ads
Mall Displays
Direct Mail
e-Commerce
Each project in each category has its own time line of due dates: concepts, copy, layouts, proofs, revised proofs, final layouts, color proofs, printing date, insertion date, in-store delivery, etc. This helps to keep every project on schedule.
I also hold a weekly Marketing meeting with the merchandising team so they can be kept abreast of all deadlines.
Like you, I also spend a lot of time in meetings, traveling, training, etc. I know that without the few organizational tools I've outlined here, I'd be sunk.
Good luck.Any tips on how you stay organized within a hectic, ever changing work environment?Maybe this sounds rather simple but have you ever thought of making a task list with deadlines?
I do this myself and it works well for me :-)
Best,
Erol Alici
