Today's Marketing Cookie - Never Rest

Today's Marketing Cookie is giving your marketing team permission to "chill" and take it easy before the "big project" arrives. Pure nonsense. Before I explain why I disagree with today's fortune, let me first say why I agree.

First of all, taking time off for vacation with your family is critically important!  While you may "check in" with the office once or twice to make sure everything is okay, a vacation must be time AWAY from your desk.  Believe it or not, I had never taken a "real" vacation before I joined CommCreative and my boss forced me to put away the computer for a week and spend time with my family on the beach. I'm so glad he did. While I was on that vacation, I got a sun burn and started drawing again. (picture of times square)

While, you may try to schedule vacation during a time of the year when there would be the least amount of disruption, "time away from work" is not really what today's fortune is talking about.

Working all hours of the night and on weekends is not sustainable, and my boss doesn't allow it. We've had clients in years past who made unrealistic requests and expected our agency to work around the clock for them.  If those clients could not be retrained, they were fired.

While there are occasional emergencies in any business, my boss believes that rushing and scrambling around is not a sign of dedication, but rather a sign of poor planning. One of the greatest things we do for our clients is train them to look ahead with a structured marketing plan and content calendar. By having the discipline to create and maintain a plan, the client no longer needs to create emergencies. Its not easy. In fact, it takes a lot of hard work to not have to work hard. Ninety-nine percent of the time, our agency closes down at five o'clock every day and the weekends are off limits.  However, "work/life balance" is not really what today's fortune is talking about.

Today's cookie is suggesting that you ought to take advantage of "down time" and you should catch your breath before the next big project hits. I disagree. Even during the worst recession in my lifetime, there has never been a period of time when is was okay to rest. In fact, the recession has probably been our busiest and most productive time ever. Our clients needed leads during a time when prospects were buying less. So, we worked harder.

Sometimes a few projects would end at the same time and there would be literally NO client work to be done. When we aren't "busy" working on a client project, we are working on our own marketing. When there wasn't a client pushing us, we push ourselves. Some of our best innovations have occurred during times when the clients were quiet. When we had built up a three-month backlog of future blog posts for our clients, we focused on our own blog. I disagree with today's fortune because there is no such thing as "down time" in an agency. When you take a "professional nap", you will get lethargic and have a difficult time getting yourself up to speed again.