Breaking the Cycle of Pseudo Productivity in Marketing

And there's a lot of pressure to constantly engage in what Cal Newport calls pseudo productivity.

Right.

So it's like, how much activity can we generate, how many ebooks can we create, how many email campaigns can we create, how much content can we create?

And unfortunately, what happens is gets lost in the mix is what is the focus of that content?

That's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

And I'm your host, Brett Dystro.

If you could please just subscribe to this podcast really does help with the rankings and also review because that helps as well.

But this week we're going to be talking about B2B marketing.

Yes, as I always say, the more boring but important side of marketing.

But with me, I have Marcus, and He has over 20 years of experience within the marketing world, being a marketing strategist, coach, copywriter, and helping entrepreneurs and B2B marketing companies conquer their most frustrating marketing challenges, which is the overall comes thing.

We're going to talking about just getting over those challenging factors within the B2B marketing space and entrepreneurs just a little bit.

But overall, so we can help you guys overcome those challenges.

But welcome to the show, Marcus.

Thank you so much, Brett.

Pleasure to be here.

Yes.

And the first question is all my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

I am now neither, actually, because I was a coffee drinker and I recently quit about six weeks ago and took me a few weeks to get over the withdrawal, but I'm trying to drink a lot more water.

Is it.

Did you do like the cold turkey where you get headaches and stuff, or did you like gradually start doing it?

I had to gradually do it.

But even after tapering off for a few weeks, that last step was still rather brutal.

And I still had.

That's actually why I quit, because I had a history of headaches and migraines, so I thought maybe the caffeine was triggering it.

Yeah, it was not.

I don't suggest it for anybody unless you're ready to go through some pretty gnarly withdrawal.

Gotcha.

Yes.

Drinking water is always important, and I've always tried to drink the recommended amount per day.

I think my Fitbit tells me about 64 ounces of water a day.

I don't know if I can do that much, though.

I just try to make sure that I was drinking three cups of coffee a day, which I don't know if it's a lot or a little, but I figure if I'm at least replacing those three cups of coffee with water and Then other times during the day I should be in good shape.

That's fair.

I drink about three.

I try to cut off at three, sometimes four, but mostly three.

That seems reasonable.

I still do drink.

My wife actually got really into drinking lattes like two months before I decided to quit drinking coffee, which is a weird timing.

But I still do it when we go out and have some coffee together.

A little bit of a coffee date together.

It's still a fun thing.

So I haven't quit to the point where I won't touch it.

It's just not a daily, a daily need anymore.

Thankfully it's not a necessity, it's just more of a enjoyment.

Exactly.

Got you.

And I gave a brief summary of your expertise.

Can you give listeners a little bit more about what you do?

Yes.

So as you mentioned, I have a little over 20 years of experience in marketing.

A lot of that in the few recent years has been copywriting for SaaS companies doing both content and also messaging for lead generation campaigns, email, website content, that kind of thing.

And a big part of what I done with clients over the years has involved a lot of coaching.

But I've recently in the last six months or so decided to really focus on coaching 100%.

So I still work with entrepreneurial clients in using my copywriting skills to help them develop their messaging.

But what I really focus on more is making sure that their positioning and their messaging strategy is really in place and has a good foundation before they start worrying about what tactics to you to expand through or what exactly their tagline should be.

Those are all things that should come later.

So a lot of my focus is really on the strategic side now.

So what are some of the pitfalls or the obstacles a lot of marketers face nowadays?

Is it the understanding how to use AI?

Because apparently everybody has to use or at least understand how to use AI.

Is it just not really focusing on the right message to the right customer?

What is it that's really stumbling blocks for a lot of marketers?

It's a great question.

I think AI brings up a good point where I think it's easy to get distracted.

Right?

ChatGPT, obviously for copywriting or for messaging is a big or specifically content creation is a big aspect of the tools that marketers use now.

But you can have even if ChatGPT or a similar AI chatbot would be able to create eloquently written content, it's not going to really make much difference if it's still generic.

So I think one of the challenges that particularly professional Marketers within marketing teams like for SaaS companies struggle with is there's so many shiny new objects all the time and there's a lot of pressure to constantly engage in what Cal Newport calls pseudo productivity.

Right.

So it's like how much activity can we generate, how many ebooks can we create, how many email campaigns can we create, how much content can we create?

And unfortunately what happens is, gets lost in the mix is what is the focus of that content, what is the actual insights that you're delivering that can't easily be found through a simple Google search or now through a ChatGPT search.

So I think that's ultimately it's my principal philosophy is really slow down first, ask the important questions, make the hard decisions first, and then look at all the different tools that are available and figure out which makes the most sense for you rather than just chasing whatever the latest trend is and how can.

They stop doing it?

Because it is hard to even follow the latest Trends nowadays because TikTok creates like trends.

It seems like almost every day, every hour.

And you're having to constantly, especially if you're doing a lot of social media, you're having constantly to follow these trends.

So is it really the trends or is it just people like, like you said, you're being pseudo busy?

Look, I'm doing things that may not actually work, it may not help, actually help the business.

But a lot of times, and I could even attest to this, sometimes our bosses just want us to be busy.

It may not actually be good, but they just want us to be busy so that it looks like they get what they're paying for.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

And I think there's a systemic issue here when it comes to work culture in general, which is this kind of altar of busyness, right?

It's this constant who's the fastest that can respond to Slack messages.

It's like the game that a lot of people are playing.

And since I work a lot also with entrepreneurs who run their own businesses, they don't.

They might not have the same pressure because they're essentially the boss, but even from themselves there's this kind of compulsion to just be in constant motion.

And you mentioned TikTok earlier and trends and you also mentioned B2B, particularly in B2B, it's a very different animal, right?

So if you're focused, let's say you're selling a high end software to a very limited universe of potential companies, right?

You might be on TikTok, you might be on a lot of social media.

But that's not necessarily a prerequisite.

Ultimately what matters is how well do you understand that niche, how well do you understand that ideal customer?

How specific are you about the specific problems that you solve so that it's not especially with higher end B2B.

Yes, there's a certain minimum quantity that's required in order to create traction and momentum.

But.

But it's not a quantity game like let's say a B2C kind of consumer product might be.

So I think ultimately really begins with starting with understanding where you are.

Right.

What is your situation.

And if you work for a company as a marketer that's B2B and you're selling very expensive software programs or solutions and you feel like you're being pressured by your CMO or above to be just generate activity.

That's something that you have to as an individual be able to navigate and be able to maybe influence that culture a little bit so that you can focus on doing the thinking and the deep work that's actually going to move the needle rather than just treading water trying to keep up with just activity for activity's sake.

And as a caveat too, there is a time and place just to test a lot of different things.

So I'm not anti activity.

There might be a time and place just to be like, hey, hey, we don't know what's going to work yet.

Let's try a bunch of small experiments and see what starts to get some traction.

That's perfectly fine.

But that's coming from a more strategic, mindful approach than just racing to constantly churn out another email campaign.

Yeah.

And there's something to say about actually being like bored or not doing things can actually help with a creative or strategic mindset because a lot of times we can't always be busy because then our mind gets tired and then we feel it too.

So as a quote unquote busy marketer, I think, and I think a lot of bosses need to understand this, sometimes just letting the mind rest, sometimes just like reading things, maybe learning new things can help eventually in the long run.

And I think we have that disconnect between always busy and never doing anything.

There has to be this middle ground.

Yeah.

And I'll double down on what you just said.

And I think not only should it occasionally happen, I think it should be built into what how we work.

Especially now when we have AI that's such a.

It's so much at the forefront of so many's work.

So many people's work now.

So you think about if you're trying to outpace automated tools and outwork in the sense of just sheer production of words or campaigns or whatever, you're never going to do it right?

It's never.

I'm never going to be able to write more content than an AI now, hopefully I'll be able to write more targeted content, more readable content.

That's maybe that'll change soon.

But.

But the point is that where we really are going to be bringing more and more value to our work, whether you're an entrepreneur or working on a marketing team, is our ability to think, is our ability to solve problems, is our ability to think abstractly.

Right.

And to read and to learn.

All these things are so important and they can't just be left to like once every three months or six months where you have a strategy kickoff for the year and you're going to now solve some problems, it should be ideally a part of every day.

Even if you're just carving out a little bit of white space every day, you're just blocking off.

Because if you think about how many people are on more than eight to 10 Zoom calls a day, right?

And that's probably being rather conservative.

We don't think twice about being on yet another zoom call where we're barely participating and we didn't really need to be there.

But to carve out an hour of white space just to problem solve seems like very uncomfortable for a lot of people.

And I think that's where marketers, especially if you're self employed, you have the ability to make those choices without any repercussions from anybody on their team or a boss.

But again, it seems so antithetical to that kind of hustle culture mentality that we should always be in motion.

I just think it's the most important shift we can possibly make, whether you're in marketing or not.

I just think that if we're going to continue having work as we know it and creating value as human beings, we need to shift because we can't keep going faster pace at this rate.

We have to shift to what we're actually bringing our strengths.

How do we get into that mindset is probably the next step because we've always been the mindset of busyness.

That's kind of like the hallmark of LinkedIn in a way.

Look what I'm doing and like this is the new thing that I'm doing and this is this and this is that.

What?

How do we get into that mindset of just yes, there's an activity space and then there's a learning time, and then there's a rest time.

Because like I said, we always need rest, we always need learning, and we always need to do work.

Nobody can just do one thing amazingly well and everything else, it just gets left by the wayside.

How do we get into that mindset?

I think it is a mindset.

I think it's a big shift for some people.

I think it starts with personal choices about how you want to live.

Right.

Not to get too in the weeds about things outside of marketing, but it does relate to what does.

What do you want your life to look like?

What do you think is important?

And making those decisions that are sometimes really and oftentimes actually really uncomfortable.

So leaning into the discomfort of being like, look, if you get to a point where you're burned out, if you get to a point where you're just moving faster but producing less, and you're actually not achieving these goals that you think are just really important to you, at some point you hit a wall and you have to make a choice.

If you keep trying to outpace it or if you're going to change how you approach work, change how you approach productivity, and that can be really uncomfortable.

And I think that stops people from even considering a change.

So I think the first step before even mindset is just allowing yourself to feel that discomfort because it's got.

You're going to experience it.

Like what I was saying about coffee, right?

It was uncomfortable, right.

But ultimately, in the long run, for me personally, I feel like it's a better choice.

It's very similar.

There's some people that will listen to this and they'll be like, not a problem.

I like the hustle, whatever, do it.

That's a personal choice.

But for people that are listening or like, the resonates with them and they feel burnt out, they feel like they're not really productive, but they're just chasing.

Just realize that if you try to shift how you approach your work, it's going to feel uncomfortable.

And that doesn't mean there's anything wrong and doesn't mean you're doing it the wrong way.

That just means that you're making a big shift.

And once you're able to kind of lean into that discomfort and accept it, that's when you start to see some real changes in your perception.

Because then you can have the mindset shift where you can actually take a step back, have some objective perspective on how you live your life and how you work and Be able to actually look and say, what is this getting me?

Like, where am I actually going with this?

And again, everybody's journey is going to be different.

Right?

But that's, for me, the first place I would start.

If you're really starting to question just the status quo of just your busier is the king of everything.

It's almost like you got to experiment within yourself to experiment with your marketing strategies at the same time.

Because like you said, and some people could be on the different ends of the spectrum of they love the Hustle because they're not burned out yet.

Then they get burned out.

Then they start to hate the Hustle because I think we're always in that cycle of we have a lot of energy, we have a lot of drive.

We're going to do all this stuff.

Okay, now I'm completely burned out.

I don't know what I'm doing anymore and I need to change my workflow type of a thing.

I do think there's cycles.

Life just has cycles in and of itself.

Fashion comes back in every five to 10 years, probably even 15 to 20 years.

Look at record sales.

They outpace CDs for the first time this year.

And that's weird to me because I grew up on tapes and CDs, and I'm like, vinyl.

Really?

Yeah.

And the thing is to go even further into this is that with the discomfort.

Oh, I'm going to butcher this quote.

But I remember reading in a few different books about this study where they put college students in a room and they were like, you have to spend 15 minutes just thinking, just with your own thoughts.

And they had access to little electrodes or whatever that would.

They could give themselves mild shocks.

And the majority of them preferred to give themselves mild electrical shocks rather than actually sit there in their own thoughts.

I butchered the details of it, but anybody that's read about that, you'll know what I'm talking about.

But essentially the issue here is that for a lot of people, spending any amount of time just contemplating, just with a pad of blank paper and just sitting in three, thinking about a problem is not comfortable itself.

So there's a lot of different force.

It's not just one thing.

It's not just because bosses are driving you.

It's not just because we're constantly surrounded by distractions.

It's a lot of different things.

But I think ultimately it is like any other skill.

And it starts with do we decide that it's important or not?

And I guess the question I would invite people to ask themselves that are listening is do you see three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now that you're going to be able to outpace AI, that you're going to be able to outpace technology and to be able to create value?

If you think the answer is yes, okay, have at it.

Right?

For me the answer is no.

And nor would I want to try.

Because I know if I bring any value into this world, it's not just because I'm hustling through the day.

It's because I'm actually being very deliberate in what I'm trying to create.

And in order to do that, there has to be space within my day for me to think, for me to contemplate, to reflect, to recharge, to rest.

All these different things that are really important.

And I like to think that I am very productive.

Like not to pat myself on the back, but I don't consider myself a non productive person person.

But if you were to look at my day, my daily calendar, you would think that I'm, it's like sparse, right?

There's three or four things on there, but there are three or four really important things.

And I get a lot done, I make a lot of progress on the things that matter and I don't have a lot of stuff on there that's going to interfere with that.

Yeah, I mean we all have our different types of priorities for that.

But like, for me, like I usually get a lot of stuff done pretty like in the morning I get really productive and then by the afternoon I'm slowing myself down so I do something else because I know if I'm just slowing down, there's just no point.

I'm just gonna slow everything down.

I'm not really gonna get anything done.

I'm gonna stare at a screen.

But also for marketing, like I agree with you, I can't compete with AI, But I do say learn how to do this skill anyways because maybe it, maybe AI gets turned off, shut down, problem with Internet, I don't know.

There's a million things that could happen, go wrong with technology.

So I have this balance of understand how to do it, understand how to use AI, but still have that skill ready in case you need it, in case you can't rely on AI for whatever reason.

Oh sure, yeah.

I definitely would never recommend or advocate for not learning to use the tool.

Definitely use the tool, Learn how to use the tool.

Because it can in the right way.

It's like any tool, right?

If you use it the right way it can be incredibly useful and productive.

If you use it the wrong way, you can wind up breaking stuff.

And we'll go, let's look at content.

Right?

Just because that's where, in my experience, the last 18 months is where most of the conversation around ChatGPT tends to land, at least in the circle I'm in.

Right.

So let's just think about that for a second.

Content marketing back in the day used to not be even called content marketing.

Right?

So if you created a decent ebook that was targeted, had some good insights in it, you were in a really good position to be.

To compete for eyeballs and attention.

Right.

Those days are gone.

Right.

There's nobody that's.

There's not enough content for me to consume.

Nobody ever says that.

Right.

So what's weird is we're treating, and I'm just using content as example for marketing.

We're treating content creation as some sort of like, scarce resource that people are just demanding more ebooks and emails and blog posts about whatever.

That's not happening.

So we're so focused on producing quantity where quantity is not actually what people are looking for.

What they're looking for is specificity, insights, something that.

An aha moment.

Right.

So when you think about how that relates to your productivity as an individual, it's not, don't use AI.

Use AI.

There's a lot of stuff I find with it now that's really cool, especially podcast production stuff and cleaning up audio and things that I would never want to have to mess with.

Right.

Cool stuff.

But do I want to.

Do I personally find any value in churning out 25 blog articles that are basically just compilations and scraped off the Internet just so I can post more stuff and maybe get some temporary keyword traffic?

For me, that's not something that I'm interested in.

Ultimately, it really comes down to using the tools so that they're actually amplifying your capabilities.

So that might look like something where maybe you have a lot of insights that you want to share with an audience and you think they're going to be valuable, but you don't feel like you're a strong writer, you don't feel very confident in that, and you really do want some help to be able to compose blog posts or ebooks or whatever that can really put your ideas front and center and make them very palatable.

It's an excellent use of the tool, but that's a very different mentality than just more and more.

More for the sake of that.

Yeah, I call it the quality factor, because Everybody's looking for quality content.

Look at Hollywood.

Hollywood has not been churning out their best and they've been paying for it at the box office.

Just recently over Memorial Day, it's.

It was the worst Memorial Day open or worst like box office in 43 years.

And it's like you guys aren't producing your best.

No one wants to go watch your movies.

I can remember what.

Doom Part 2 is probably one of the better movies that came out this year alone.

And there hasn't been really any other good ones that have come out.

That's pretty bad.

That's like on a spectrum scale of content creation, that's a pretty low return on investment.

Yeah.

And it's funny that you mentioned that too, because I just was reading about Furiosa not doing very well, which was a bummer because I'm a big George Miller.

That's great.

And you go, wow, that's really sad.

It's sad to see somebody that they're not getting the success even recently.

I guess the fall guy didn't do as well as they expected.

We just rented it the other day.

We loved it.

So I was a little surprised to do better.

But maybe it was just.

You have to be in a particular mood for that movie.

But it's a good analogy with Hollywood.

And imagine that if there was a.

An AI today capable of churning out feature length, moving movies of varying quality, probably low quality, would there be studios that just do that?

Sure.

But is that actually something that's going to hook on to public interest?

Is that something that's going to move the needle culturally?

Is that anything that people are going to be proud of?

No.

So I think it's a similar thing and it's whether we use AI or not.

I don't want this to just be about technology.

Even personally, if you're more marketing your own business or you're on a marketing team and you're in this rut where you feel like you're just churning out just the same stuff over and over again.

It's.

I think that takes a toll on people.

I think people get into marketing a lot unless they're very much specifically on the analytical side of the house.

I think they get into marketing because they are creative.

I think they are people in general that like to solve problems.

I think there's a personal cost and a kind of cost to your soul over time.

If whether you're using the technology to do it or not, if you just feel like you're just grinding through a process day after day, that's something that even if you didn't have to keep up with a really ridiculous workload every day, that still I think takes a toll when you multiply it by the fact that you have to basically balance 17 different projects at once.

There's no wonder why you're seeing such epic rates of burnout and the fact.

That PR people may have to do marketing and vice versa.

And they're two different actual skill sets.

Because marketing is mostly about sales and advertising to a certain extent.

And PR is mostly about awareness and driving that attention seeking type of factor.

And also less about advertising than marketing.

Not saying it's not all.

There isn't any advertising, just less about it.

There's less focus on it.

So you have this constant.

And I remember doing it for a couple of gaming peripheral companies.

I always had to switch my brain.

And that gets exhausting after a while because you're like, okay, I'm just tired.

Yeah, the tasks, this, I can't even pronounce it for some reason.

Task switching in any endeavor when marketing or otherwise is enormously taxing to the brain, it just takes a lot of energy.

And all these things again come back to we are in creative fields.

Pr, marketing, sales, these are all creative fields, right.

And they require us to be able to solve problems in new ways, anticipate changes, see into angles that other people aren't seeing.

Right.

That's where our competitive strengths are.

That's where we compete.

Everybody has ChatGPT.

It's 20 bucks a month for the, for whatever the paid version is.

There's no competitive advantage if everybody has it.

So really where our competitive advantage is going to be are things like our experience, our insight and our knowledge of our customers and our passion for the product and the problems we solve.

Like all these things that, that are hard to scale.

And I think that's one of the aspects of this too is we're so enamored with the concept of scaling.

And I think understandably, for good reasons, we want to be able to grow.

Growth is essential to humans and to business and everything.

But if it's at the expense of everything else, if it's just scaling.

Email campaigns is a great example.

We all get spam every day.

It's infinitely scalable, but it's all trash.

And so what are we creating as marketers?

What are we creating as PR professionals and sales professionals?

And ultimately it's hard enough just doing it well that people respond to and then gets traction.

But if we're doing stuff that we don't even feel the least bit proud of, because ultimately everything just comes down to how quickly can we scale it.

Then we just wind up all just creating spam.

And personally, that's not really what I got into marketing for.

When I got into marketing was my first business many years ago was a personal training business like fitness training.

And I needed to figure out how to get clients.

That was it.

It was like, I want to build this business.

How can I do that?

And so there was a purpose and a meaning behind it.

And I think again, I'm going to guess that a lot of people that spend years building a marketing career or a career in PR or sales are doing it.

Yes.

They want to make a good living, of course, but they're doing it because they care about it.

And so ultimately these kinds of things, when we think about the typical workday for a lot of companies, if they just get pushed out, if those concepts and those values just get pushed down and marginalized.

Yeah, that's when we see the kind of look, look at what we see as content on the Internet.

Now.

It's just there's been a lot of talk lately about the death of the Internet because we're basically more than ever and it was already happening before AI or ChatGPT, but we're just seeing just flooded with just the same generic repurposed garbage over and over again.

Infinitely.

Right.

And so that's broken SEO, the way we knew it five years ago was like, okay, that's going to need to shift a lot.

So there's a lot going on.

But I think ultimately it really starts to starts with asking ourselves some questions and making some tough decisions and deciding what kind of stuff do we want to create.

Where do we go from here?

How do we get to that spot where we're all good?

To a certain extent, we're always going to be changing.

People change all the time.

There's no way about it.

Change is the only constant.

I think this is the best phrase is because we're always changing.

So how do we get to that better spot of doing our work, but also learning and also taking rest?

Yeah, I think individually and collectively.

Right.

So individually, it's a personal decision people have to make for themselves and look at their lives and look at their careers and ask themselves, is, is this working for me?

Am I happy?

Am I productive?

Am I fulfilled Very personal choices that people have to make and consider for themselves collectively, culturally.

Right.

I think that's.

We're way overdue for a shift in how we, how we evaluate work and productivity to Begin with.

I mentioned Cal Newport earlier, who I don't know if you've read Deep Work, but the more recently Slow Productivity, his newest book.

You read something like that.

And it's like, why aren't we there already?

And I think ultimately there is.

There's a lot of factors, financially, of course, but I think there's a misunderstanding ultimately, personally and collectively, that if we slow down, that somehow means that we're not as productive.

And I think that's a kind of illusion that we're collectively under.

And if we can individually break that illusion and then ultimately, through time and magnification, be able to scale that, I'll go back to scaling in a good way.

Right, to scale that so that collectively, culturally, we can look and say, you know what?

We can be more productive if we actually nurture our human needs to rest, to think, to recuperate, to be creative.

Like, we can have it all.

But we can't do that if we're chasing these kinds of.

These kinds of, like, false trophies of productivity.

That really is just about how quickly we're replying to emails and how many zoom calls we're on and all that stuff.

So it's not an easy solution.

For me.

It was easier because it just happens to be something I was willing to make that choice about.

But everybody has to make that choice for themselves.

All right, people are listening to this episode and they're wondering, where can they find you online?

Best place is my website.

Marcuschaller.com M A R C U S S C-H-A-L-L-E-R.com all right, any final thoughts for listeners?

No, just basically just listen to your gut.

Right.

If what we've just been talking about feels like nonsense to you, then it's nonsense.

It doesn't matter.

Right.

But if it's something that resonates with you at all and you're not really sure how to get started with it, the first thing is just really trust your instincts and realize that if things aren't working as far as.

If you don't feel the way you're working right now is sustainable, there's wisdom in that intuition and it's worth following to see where that leads.

All right, thank you, Marcus, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and just sharing your knowledge on work productivity and all that other stuff in between.

Thank you.

I appreciate coming on.

Thanks so much and thank you for listening as always.

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All right, guys, stay safe, get to understanding your work life and just how to work efficiently, and see you next week later.