Finding the flow: Why marketers need space to think

Posted by Mike O'Brien on November 6, 2026 in Postcards from the digital frontier | Leave a comment

Marketing, minus the hype | A Jam session

Marketing productivity is under pressure. We have never had more tools, more data or more opportunities to connect with customers. Yet, for many marketers, finding the time to think has never been harder.

The working day begins with an inbox already demanding attention. Campaign performance needs reviewing. Content needs approving. Budgets need defending. AI promises another leap in productivity, while another platform introduces another feature that everyone apparently needs to understand.

And somewhere in the middle of all this activity sits a marketer trying to make sense of it.

The problem is not necessarily a shortage of talent, ambition or commitment. It is that the conditions surrounding modern marketing can make sustained, creative thinking increasingly difficult.

When everything demands attention, very little receives the attention it deserves.

That is why finding the flow matters.

First, a moment to listen

Finding the flow is part of the Jam: Less hype. More help. series, exploring the realities of modern marketing through ideas, practical insights and music. This spoken-word Jam reflects on the pressure of constant activity and the importance of creating space for the thinking that makes marketing valuable.

Listen to Finding the flow. A spoken-word reflection on marketing, creativity and rediscovering the space to think.

The track poses a simple question: when did being busy become more important than being effective?

The hidden cost of always-on marketing

Marketing has become an extraordinary combination of creativity, technology, analysis and commercial accountability.

That combination creates opportunity. It also creates friction.

A marketer might begin the morning reviewing campaign performance, move into a creative briefing, respond to a customer complaint, evaluate an AI-generated content proposal and finish by explaining a budget variance.

Each task demands a different kind of thinking.

The difficulty is not simply the number of tasks. It is the constant switching between them.

Research into attention and task switching suggests that interruptions can create additional mental effort and make it harder to resume complex work. The effects vary by task and individual, but the implications for marketing are significant.

When attention becomes fragmented, teams risk spending more time responding to demands than understanding the problems behind them.

Four familiar symptoms often emerge:

• Cognitive overload: Too much information competes for limited attention.
• Reactive decision-making: Immediate demands displace longer-term priorities.
• Fragmented creativity: Ideas struggle to develop when thinking is repeatedly interrupted.
• Loss of rhythm: Teams become trapped in cycles of activity without sufficient time to reflect, learn and improve.

The result can be a marketing function that appears exceptionally busy while struggling to demonstrate meaningful progress.

More activity does not automatically create more value.

What does flow actually mean?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularised the concept of flow, describing a state of deep engagement in which attention becomes absorbed in an activity.

Flow is often associated with a balance between the challenge of a task and the skills available to meet it, supported by clear goals and useful feedback.

It is the experience of becoming so engaged in solving a problem that distractions fade and the work itself becomes rewarding.

For marketers, flow might emerge while developing a positioning strategy, exploring an unexpected customer insight, shaping a compelling campaign idea or finding a solution to a difficult commercial challenge.

It is not simply about feeling relaxed.

Flow can involve demanding work, sustained concentration and considerable mental effort.

The difference is that the effort has direction.

And that distinction matters.

Busy describes how much is happening. Flow describes the quality of engagement with what matters.

The solution: Create the conditions for better thinking

Flow cannot be guaranteed or switched on at will. However, working practices can make sustained attention and meaningful progress more likely.

For marketing managers dealing with tight budgets, demanding stakeholders and constantly changing priorities, the answer is rarely an elaborate productivity system.

It begins with a few practical choices.

1. Reduce the noise

Not every notification requires an immediate response. Not every dashboard needs constant attention. Not every new marketing technology deserves immediate adoption.

A useful starting point is to distinguish between information that supports a decision and information that merely demands attention.

This might involve reviewing notification settings, reducing unnecessary reporting or establishing agreed periods when non-urgent communications can wait.

The objective is not to ignore information. It is to make information useful.

2. Protect time for meaningful work

A diary filled entirely with meetings leaves little room for the thinking required to make those meetings worthwhile.

Even a protected twenty-minute period can provide an opportunity to examine one problem without interruption.

The important distinction is between time allocated to completing tasks and time protected for understanding them.

Both are necessary. Neither should consume the other.

3. Focus on one worthwhile question

Marketing challenges frequently become overwhelming because too many questions are being addressed simultaneously.

A campaign might be underperforming, but the immediate response does not have to involve changing creative, targeting, channels and budgets at the same time.

A more useful starting point might be:

What is the most important thing that needs to be understood before anything changes?

One clear question creates direction.

Direction makes focused thinking easier.

4. Reconnect creativity with commercial purpose

Creativity becomes more valuable when it is connected to a problem worth solving.

That might involve understanding why customers abandon a purchase, identifying an underserved audience or developing a clearer reason for customers to choose one brand over another.

The aim is not simply to produce more ideas.

It is to create the conditions in which useful ideas can emerge, be evaluated and translated into action.

5. Build a rhythm of reflection and improvement

Marketing teams need more than a continuous cycle of planning, publishing, measuring and repeating.

They also need opportunities to ask what has been learned.

Which activities contributed to meaningful outcomes? Which assumptions proved incorrect? What should change next time?

These questions help turn experience into capability.

Without reflection, teams risk becoming more efficient at repeating the same mistakes.

From flow to better decisions

Creating space to think is valuable. But thinking alone does not deliver marketing results.

Insight needs to inform decisions. Decisions need to guide action. And action needs to create a contribution that can be understood and evaluated.

This is where a structured planning approach becomes useful.

The ICONIC Planning Framework provides a way of connecting six essential areas of marketing thinking:

Investigate. Customers. Opportunities. Numbers. Implementation. Contribution.

Each stage creates a clearer connection between understanding the situation and deciding what to do about it.

The framework does not promise to eliminate uncertainty or guarantee flow.

Its value lies in helping marketers organise complexity, identify priorities and maintain a connection between creative thinking and commercial outcomes.

The relationship is straightforward.

Space creates the opportunity to think. Structure helps turn that thinking into decisions. Action creates the opportunity to contribute.

This is also why human judgement becomes more important as AI takes on a greater share of marketing activity.

Technology can accelerate analysis, content development and execution. It can reduce the time required for many routine tasks.

But acceleration is only valuable when there is clarity about direction.

Without that clarity, technology can simply help teams become busy faster.

A different measure of a productive day

The marketing profession has become highly skilled at measuring activity.

Impressions. Clicks. Conversions. Engagement. Output. Productivity.

These measures have their place.

But there is another question worth asking.

Did the work undertaken today improve the organisation’s understanding, decisions or ability to create value?

A marketer who spends twenty minutes identifying the real cause of a customer problem may contribute more than someone who spends the same time producing another report that nobody uses.

A team that challenges an assumption before launching a campaign may prevent weeks of wasted effort.

A moment of clarity can sometimes be worth more than another hour of activity.

This is not an argument for working less or abandoning performance measures.

It is an argument for recognising that the quality of thinking influences the value of the work that follows.

Finding the flow

Modern marketing will not become less demanding simply because marketers recognise the need for greater focus.

There will still be deadlines, dashboards, difficult decisions and demanding customers.

AI will continue to change the tools and capabilities available. Channels will evolve. Expectations will rise.

But within that environment, organisations can make deliberate choices about how work happens.

They can protect attention rather than continually fragmenting it.

They can create room for curiosity rather than expecting every idea to arrive on demand.

They can use structure to support judgement rather than allowing processes to dictate activity.

And they can recognise that creativity, capability and contribution depend on more than simply doing more.

The best marketing does not always begin with another action.

Sometimes it begins with a better question.

A moment to think.

A moment to decide.

A moment to create.

And then a moment to act.

Find the space. Feel the rhythm. Follow the flow.

Jam: Less hype. More help.

One small Jam to try

Before the next working day becomes consumed by messages, meetings and deadlines, a marketer can try a simple experiment.

Twenty minutes. One question. No interruptions.

The question should be commercially meaningful, rather than simply another task to complete.

At the end of the session, three things can be recorded:

1. What became clearer?
2. What decision now needs to be made?
3. What action would create the greatest value?

It may not produce a breakthrough every time.

But it begins to establish a habit that modern marketing increasingly needs: protecting the quality of thinking before accelerating the quantity of activity.

Less hype. More help. Better marketing.