Episode: 175
You know that strategy document? The important one? The one that has been open in a browser tab for two weeks while you firefight everything else?
Welcome to Q4. For some of us that means planning season, budget season and the pre-Christmas deadline crunch. For others it means the peak: Black Friday, Christmas, and the biggest sales days of the entire year landing in a matter of weeks. Two completely different quarters, and yet the same thing happens in both. The strategic work, the thinking that shapes next year, is the first thing to get eaten.
In this episode I am sharing my system for defending strategic work through the loudest quarter of the year, whatever loud looks like for you: why urgent wins by default and how to rig the game back, the one sacred weekly block I refuse to surrender, pre-deciding what drops when chaos hits, batching the reactive work so it stops shredding your days, and the trade-off conversation that keeps stakeholders on side while you protect what matters.
Q4 does not have to eat your strategy. But you do have to fight for it, and here is how.
And if building a whole week that protects your best work, not just surviving Q4 but operating like this all year, is the bigger project, that is Module 4 territory in The Marketer You Already Are - a 5-module self-paced course for ambitious marketers who are ready to stop being the best-kept secret on their team. Build confidence, presence, and strategic thinking and finally be seen as senior [more here] .