Priorities and planning
Marketing grows more technical by the day. Two years ago we weren’t fielding questions about canonical indexed pages in Search Console, AI search results and the potential demise of Google, or implementing tokenized design systems into Claude Design so sales teams can design their own assets.
To be a marketer today you need to be part systems engineer fluid in GitHub repos and MCP connections in addition to a wordsmith or social media strategist. The “T-shaped” specialist requires more breadth and more depth to function, and Claude can do only so much.
We do all these things, of course, but it’s requiring more research and collaboration than before, which works itself out in how we as a team—internally and with clients—can coordinate our activities throughout the week or month.
The systems engineering skill set is table stakes for 2026. AI tools are increasingly capable, but the volume and verbosity of their outputs only increase the challenge of collaboration and focus.
Everyone I talk to is busier than they’ve ever been reviewing the outputs or assessing how the systems talk to each other. Some call this time “evals” or the “human-in-the-loop” process. It often practically works out as one person’s Claude outputs reviewing another person’s Claude outputs.
The value of a knowledge worker, then, has shifted from production to coordination, where progress and performance come more from a team’s ability to focus on only the highest leverage activities during the week, month, or year. In other words, priorities lead to performance.
Several years ago a developer named Dave Stewart so acutely described the “work around the work” in a piece called “The work is never just ‘the work,’” drawn from a year-long study of why project timelines never behave. I referenced this months ago, but I keep coming back to it.
His taxonomy is almost liturgical:
- The work around the work: meetings, reviews, coordination
- The work between the work: iteration and refinement
- The work beyond the work: the changes and the scope that creeps
- The work outside the work: attending to a child with a fever or trying to get your $134 back from Delta for missing your connection
Each one independently is no big deal. Together they can eat up an entire week.
That’s why our team met this week to develop new ways to plan and produce our work so we can maximize every dollar spent with us toward marketing performance.
We’re working on a new way to use our tools as well as planning periods on Mondays and Fridays to accurately assess each question, thread, or task, create a plan of action, and get to work on the most important project ahead of us.
At times, the noise in knowledge work—marketing, finance, engineering—can feel immense. We still believe that slow is smooth, smooth is fast, so we’re aiming to be more focused and deliberate to produce the most important work possible.
As always, we’re grateful to serve.
