Brighter Marketing

We are all creatures of habit and it can play havoc with marketing creativity and generating new ideas. We all tend to do the same things every day and often don’t stop to think about what we are doing and why we are doing it.

We recently undertook a marketing creativity workshop and we asked the participants what they did each day. It looked something like this…

• Got into work
• Switched on the PC
• Read emails
• Answered emails and answered telephone calls
• Looked at their to do list
• Went to meetings
• Ate lunch at desk
• Talked to colleagues
• Made cups of tea/coffee
• Crossed off and added things to their to do list
• Wrote letters/projects/briefs
• Went home
• Had dinner
• Did chores
• Put kids to bed
• Watched TV etc

Then we asked them when they did their most important work, the stuff that needed real brain power, creativity or ideas generation. Their answers included

• After my emails
• After meetings
• When I get chance
• On the way home on the train
• After lunch

It seemed that emails, phone calls and meetings were king in their world. So we made one simple suggestion, what if when they came in, in the morning they didn’t switch on their PC and become distracted by emails for the first hour. They could instead focus on an important piece of work that required some thought and creativity.  It is so easy to believe that emails, phone calls and meetings are important, sure they make you look busy, but they often don’t require any creativity and it means that all the brain power you need to think differently or come up with ideas, is used up on smaller less important tasks.

Tim Ferriss Author of the 4 Hour Work Week, has some great tips on organising your time and making sure that you prioritise the most important tasks. His book is not so much about creativity but making sure that you focus on what is important and not get distracted by emails, telephone calls etc.

So why not try having a PC free and telephone free hour every day – you never know what great marketing ideas you might come up with