Many marketers in the education sector will need to “do more with less” in 2026.
And the first instinct is to just work harder and look for technological fixes to speed things up.
But I believe the first step to raising productivity is to look for work that takes up a lot of time and attention, but doesn’t contribute (much) to your output.
And reduce or eliminate it.
What is ‘productivity’, actually?
Productivity doesn’t just mean ‘what you produce’.
That is ‘output’ or ‘production’.
It refers to the results you can achieve with a specific (limited) amount of resources – your return on time, money and effort.
The quickest way to raise productivity is to cut out busywork – work that takes a lot of time and contributes little to meaningful outcomes.
An example: How publishing less led to more visibility
A while back, I worked with an organisation that thought they had a winning strategy for attracting search traffic. They’d write lots of articles. Initially, with every article they published, they gained extra website traffic.
But after some time, the website became a jumble of overlapping articles (aka duplicate content; not good). The more articles they published, the fewer clicks they received.
I worked with the editorial team to create a content taxonomy. After I trained them, they sorted through their content and removed, merged, updated and recategorised countless articles, which helped them bend their downward trajectory into an upward one.
While they still publish, much more attention goes to keeping their existing articles up-to-date and making sure they offer the best advice on the web.
A similar case is documented in the Corporate Finance Institute case study in my book Genuinely Helpful: After trimming 15% of their content, they saw a 4% increase in traffic, and 6% more leads – over the 6 months that followed!
What does this mean for you?
Realistically, many of us are going to need to do more with less in 2026. And it’s tempting to translate that into “we will all need to work a little harder” or “we’ll find ways to let AI do the work we do now”.
But these are short-term fixes.
You’ll get burned out.
People will leave the team and you’ll need to hire and train replacements.
AI will go off the rails and you’ll spend as much time correcting it as doing the job yourself in the first place.
It’s better to take a step back and look at the spec first. Simplify whatever you can, then look for ways to speed up the work that remains.
In my experience, you can only raise your productivity if you invest time up front for reflection. You need to slow down before you can speed up.
Some questions to ask yourself, your colleagues and your (internal) clients:
- What should we be doing?
- To what standard?
- What is important to keep doing ‘manually’?
- What can AI and other forms of automation do for us (e.g. for content repurposing)?
- And to what extent will we need to cross-check it?
Have that conversation with your colleagues, your team and with the (internal) clients you serve.
When you save time, you can create space to do fun and exciting stuff… which will create the right buzz and you can talk about in all your channels! Like what Falmouth University does with its games expo.
Ways to work with me
- Get a student recruitment audit
- Join a digital marketing training
- Engage me for coaching and/or consulting
- Invite me to speak or deliver a workshop
That’s all for this Field Note
It’s an all-new year and I wish that 2026 will be a good year for you. All the best!
This article first appeared as a Field Note
In the Field Notes, I share one practical idea you can try on your site or in your campaigns. Every two weeks. Get it in your inbox by signing up here.
