Open your calendar right now and count how many meetings you have this week.

If you're like most marketing leaders, you probably just had a mini panic attack. 

In a recent webinar we hosted, one attendee said he had 47 meetings in a single week and had to do all his real work after hours. Another said she spends 15–20 hours a week in meetings and can’t get anything meaningful done.

Sound familiar?

The default solution to every communication problem in marketing is more meetings. Team not aligned? Let's sync up. Project behind? Emergency meeting. Someone confused about priorities? All-hands time.

We're treating symptoms, not the disease. And frankly, if your calendar is full but your strategy's a mess, something's broken.

I recently sat down with Ashley Faus (Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian) and Dr. Molly Sands (Head of the Teamwork Lab at Atlassian) to break down how the best marketing leaders are reclaiming their time and building more effective teams.

This is the exact playbook to help you start shipping work that actually matters and stop drowning in meetings.

Lead with Visibility, Not Volume

Most marketing teams confuse being busy with being productive. They think more updates equals better communication. Wrong.

"Visibility doesn't mean constant updates. It means clear, contextual ones," says Molly, whose team literally studies how high-performing teams work. Her research shows that the best teams make their work visible through project overviews, async updates, and quick context. Not through back-to-back status meetings.

Here's what this looks like in practice:

Replace your weekly status meeting with a 3-minute Loom video. Ashley's team does this religiously. Instead of gathering 8 people for 30 minutes to hear everyone say "things are on track," everyone records a quick update that covers:

1. What shipped this week
2. What's blocked (and by whom)
3. Key decisions needed

People can watch it on their own time, ask questions in comments, and you've just bought back 4+ hours of collective team time.

Make it easy for other teams to understand the results. I learned this the hard way at my first marketing job. I'd spend hours in show-and-tell meetings talking about blog posts I wrote, watching engineers' eyes glaze over. 

Then I started connecting the dots: "Remember that article I mentioned last week? It generated six backlinks, brought 312 new visitors, and converted two people who are now in sales demos." Suddenly, everyone understood why marketing mattered.

Create async check-ins that actually drive decisions. One team at Atlassian has a foolproof Slack format:

• Topic: [3-word summary]
• Relevant for: @molly @dave @ashley
• Action requested: [specific ask]
• Context: [bullets, links, or brief explanation]

If you're not tagged, you don't need to read it. If you are tagged, you know it's important. This simple framework eliminates the "reply all" cycle that buries actual important information.

Over-communication isn't the goal. Clear, intentional updates are.

Kill the Zombie Meetings

You know those meetings that happen week after week, serving no real purpose but somehow never dying? Ashley calls them zombie meetings, and they're killing your team's productivity.

"Meetings should be for dialogue, not download," Molly says. Her research shows that teams with "bursty communication patterns" (AKA lots of quick back-and-forth followed by quiet focus time) are the most successful.

Here's how to decide what actually needs a meeting:

If only one person is talking, make it async. Status updates, project kickoffs where you're just sharing information, quarterly reviews where you're presenting slides. These can all be Loom videos or pages in your wiki.

Meet for sparring, not status. Ashley uses a boxing analogy: sparring is when two equals get in the ring to improve their skills through back-and-forth. In work terms, it's when you need real-time collaboration to refine an idea, solve a problem, or make a tough decision. This requires sync time.

Meet for connection, but make it intentional. Shooting the breeze and building rapport with your team is important. But it's weird to do this over Slack. Coffee chats and relationship-building conversations need real-time interaction.

Use async to inform, then meet to decide. The most effective teams use async communication to get everyone on the same page, then use meetings to make decisions or solve problems together.

Here's a practical example: instead of a 45-minute project kickoff meeting, send a 5-minute Loom explaining the project, timeline, and roles. Then have a 15-minute meeting focused entirely on questions, concerns, and alignment.

So this week, cancel one recurring meeting and replace it with a clear async format and see how it goes. You might just buy back hours of your day.

Manage Up, Down, and Across Without Losing Your Mind

Leading a marketing team isn't just managing your direct reports. You're constantly communicating with executives, peers in other departments, and your own team. Often about the same projects, but with completely different contexts.

Molly's research identified what she calls the "3 audiences rule": every message you send should consider who needs what information: up (executives), down (your team), and across (peer departments).

Ashley has this down to a science. "I make a Loom for my boss, a different one for my team, and I share pieces in Slack threads for peers," she explains. This approach eliminates repeat conversations and creates traceable documentation.

For executives: Focus on outcomes and business impact. When Ashley's CMO asks about a project, she doesn't just send the full context page. She says: "Here's the page, and here are the 3 highlights you care about for your upcoming meeting." She literally watches her boss copy and paste those bullets into slides because she made the connection clear.

For your team: Focus on context and next steps. Your team needs to understand not just what to do, but why it matters and how it connects to bigger goals.

For peers: Focus on what they need to take action. If you're updating the sales team about a new campaign, they don't need to know your click-through rates. They need to know what messaging is resonating and how to use it in their conversations.

Pro tip: Record once, customize for different audiences. You can create one comprehensive Loom about a project, then create shorter clips for different stakeholders that focus on what they specifically care about.

Be intentional with your communications. Different messages for different audiences.

Create Space for Strategy, Not Just Output

Here's what I see happening in most marketing orgs: leaders get so caught up in managing the day-to-day that they never have time for actual leadership. You're in back-to-back meetings, responding to Slack messages, and putting out fires. When do you actually think about strategy?

"Strategy can't happen if you're constantly reacting," Ashley points out. Both she and Molly emphasized that the best marketing leaders create space for thinking and creativity. Not just task execution.

This is where good async hygiene pays off. When you're not spending 20 hours a week in status meetings, you can actually focus on the work that moves the needle.

Use async updates to buy back thinking time. Every meeting you convert to a Loom or wiki is time you can spend on strategy, creative problem-solving, or actually doing the work that only you can do.

Distinguish between execution and elevation. Ashley makes this distinction clear with her team. Execution is the day-to-day work: campaigns, content, metrics. Elevation is the strategic thinking. Why are we doing this? What's working? What should we stop doing? How do we get better?

Build recognition into your async communication. Molly's research shows that high-performing teams use async communication for recognition, not just updates. When you're sharing what shipped this week, call out who did great work and why it mattered.

Every Friday, Molly sends her team a Loom that covers what they accomplished, gives specific shout-outs, and shares what's top of mind for the coming week. "I pretend they're all watching it while drinking coffee," she says. It's become a ritual that both informs and motivates.

Remember: the best leaders create space for themselves and their team to think.

The New Rules of Marketing Leadership

Changing how your team communicates feels overwhelming when you're already drowning in meetings. But here's the thing. You can't optimize your way out of a fundamentally broken system.

The marketing leaders who are winning right now aren't the ones with the most sophisticated tech stack or the biggest budgets. They're the ones who've figured out how to create clarity, focus, and space for their teams to do their best work.

Start with these 6 changes this week

• Cancel one recurring meeting and replace it with async updates
• Try a Loom instead of your next project kickoff call
• Write a weekly async update for your boss and team using Ashley's format
• Review your calendar for "fake work" and replace it with actual strategy time
• Build visibility with clarity, not volume
• Create space for thinking (not just reacting)

Your job as a marketing leader isn't to be available for every conversation or to attend every meeting. Your job is to create the conditions for your team to ship meaningful work.

This is exactly how you make that happen.

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