Burnout called. It’s tired of being your backup plan.

Alysha Khan • public
• 2 min read

Alongside my day-to-day job of marketing operations consulting, I also advise a few folks on growing their solopreneur business into proper agencies.

For this week's newsletter, I wanted to share a modified version of the write-up I did for one client that also applies to so many marketing operations teams.

Let’s define the problem first. 

Marketing operations teams are often agreeing to projects that require:

  • Too many hours
  • In too short a time frame 
  • Under unclear conditions (which is leads to project creep and exacerbates the first two problems)

Now, because the vast majority of us are hard-working, conscientious folks, we put our heads down, bust out our tech skills, and get the job done.

But this is a surefire path to burnout.

So let's go line by line to see how we can solve this.

Too many hours

  • You need to treat your weekly capacity of 40 hours as a hard limit.
  • And frankly, between meetings, admin work, and you know, corporate life, you don't have 4o hours of heads-down time. You realistically have 20-30 hours per week and even that is often broken up and scattered throughout the day.
  • So when agreeing to new projects, you first need to have a rock-solid understanding of:
    • The work that is already on your plate. How many hours are you spending servicing the regular flow of tickets? On current projects? Meetings? Slacks? Random fire drills?
    • The priority of that work. Something will most likely have to give to accommodate the new project so it should be lower priority or nice to have items.

In too short a time frame

  • Project plans often have a built-in assumption that each domino in the plan will neatly fall one after another until the project is done. This is obviously almost never the case.
  • The best project plans have plenty of buffer, time for review cycles, alternative options in case reality doesn't match the plan, time for folks to not get back to you immediately, etc.

Under unclear conditions

  • Scoping a request or project is a learned skill and even the best of us still get ambushed by requirement changes, finicky stakeholders, and uncooperative technology.
  • Three different ways to insulate yourself against an unclear scope:
    • Make sure you actually give yourself time to scope and research before agreeing to an outcome or deadline. I know I am super guilty of saying yes way too easily and I'm getting a lot better at saying "Let me look into that and confirm with you."
    • As mentioned above, building plenty of buffer and alternative routes in your project plan means that even if you didn't scope correctly, you still have time and options available to you.
    • The minute you suspect things are getting out of scope, start raising the alarm early and often to make sure the creeping scope doesn't creep over your entire life.

See you next week,

🫶🏽 Alysha