Elena was the marketing director at a 200-person Series B company. She had a team of seven, a full roadmap, and two major campaigns that had been in 'planning' for the better part of three months. She described herself as always behind on the strategic work she was actually hired to do.
Setting Up the Layers
She defined four layers: Strategy & Planning / Campaign Execution / Internal Meetings / Admin. Three weeks of tagging, done retroactively using Tempo's calendar history import.
What the Data Showed
- →Internal Meetings: 68%
- →Campaign Execution: 22%
- →Strategy & Planning: 7%
- →Admin: 3%
A marketing director spending 68% of her working hours in internal meetings. Her Strategy layer — the category that produces positioning, messaging, channel strategy, competitive analysis, campaign briefs — was getting 7% of her week. Roughly 2.5 hours.
When I saw the 68%, I thought the tool was broken. Then I went back and counted the meetings manually. It was right.
— Elena, Marketing Director
The Audit
She went through every recurring meeting on her calendar. Not to cancel them — to evaluate each one individually. For each recurring meeting, she asked: Does my presence in this meeting change the outcome? If the answer was no, she had three options: remove herself, delegate to a team member, or change the frequency.
- →4 meetings: removed herself entirely
- →2 meetings: delegated to her content lead and paid media manager
- →3 meetings: moved from weekly to bi-weekly
The Result
Six hours per week freed up. She reinvested them entirely into Strategy & Planning, bringing that layer from 7% to approximately 25% of her week. Within one quarter: two campaigns shipped that had been stalled in planning for months, a new positioning document was completed and approved by the executive team, and her pipeline attribution numbers improved materially.
She didn't work less. She worked the same hours. The only thing that changed was the distribution — and the distribution was the problem the entire time.