Constant Slacks. “Quick syncs” that turn into 45-minutes lost in your day. Always available, but struggling to be productive. And by the time Friday rolls around, you’re not actually sure what you tackled this week. 

That’s what it’s like to be a B2B marketer in 2025. 

We're stuck in busy mode, not builder mode. And it's killing our ability to do actual marketing.

So if your calendar is full but your pipeline isn't, this is for you.

According to recent research from Grammarly, marketers are drowning in communication. Spending 42 hours per week just talking to people. That's more than a full-time job dedicated entirely to meetings, messages, and emails. And it’s marketing’s silent killer.

So this week, track where your time actually goes. Pay attention to how much you spend on communication, meetings, and content creation. Look at the split. The results might shock you.

The Cost of Performative Productivity

Here's the brutal math: Marketers lose 7.5 hours every week to performative productivity. Work that looks important but doesn't move the needle. Add another 4.6 hours lost to poor communication, and you're hemorrhaging nearly 12 hours of productive time every week.

That's not even counting the mental cost. 55% of marketers say constant notifications destroy their focus. 62% report that "always-on" culture contributes to burnout. And 75% are communicating across more channels than they were 12 months ago.

The result? We're optimizing for the appearance of productivity instead of actual results.

This performative productivity creates a vicious cycle. When everyone's constantly communicating, you feel pressure to stay visible. When you see colleagues responding to Slack at 9 PM, you think you should too. When meetings get scheduled back-to-back, it feels like important work is happening. Even when nothing gets decided.

But here's what's really happening: We're confusing motion with progress. That campaign strategy document sits unfinished while you attend three meetings about project timelines. The A/B test results remain unanalyzed because you spent two hours in email threads about brand guidelines. The competitive research gets pushed to next week because today was consumed by "urgent" communications that weren't actually urgent.

Think about your last "productive" day. How much of it was spent crafting the perfect Slack response, attending a meeting where you contributed nothing, or writing status updates that no one reads? We've created a system where being responsive feels more important than being effective.

The fix?

Block at least 2 hours a day as "do not disturb" time. No Slack, no meetings. Protect real work time like your job depends on it. Because it does.

Kill status meetings where a one-pager or async video will do. If the meeting doesn't require real-time discussion or decision-making, it shouldn't exist.

Everyone’s Using AI (But No One’s Using It Well)

Here's where it gets interesting: 86% of marketers are already using AI for work. We're early adopters, second only to IT teams. But here's the kicker. only 5% are actually fluent with AI tools. That's the lowest of any department.

Most marketers are using AI like a fancy spell-checker. Writing tweets, drafting ad copy, maybe cleaning up a blog post.

The gap between adoption and fluency tells the whole story. We jumped on AI fast because we immediately saw its potential for content creation. But we stopped there. While 88% of marketers use AI for writing, only 27% use it for long-form content like internal documents and presentations. Even fewer (just 38%) leverage AI for editing and refinement, and only 44% use it to generate ideas.

This surface-level usage is leaving massive productivity gains on the table. Think about it: if you're spending 42 hours a week communicating, and AI can help with communication, why are you only using it for the 3 hours spent writing social posts?

The real bottleneck isn't external content creation. It's all the internal communication infrastructure that keeps your marketing machine running. The project briefs, the stakeholder updates, the campaign retrospectives, the meeting summaries. The stuff that's critical but not creative. The work that has to get done but doesn't energize anyone.

Meanwhile, the real opportunity is sitting right in front of us: all that internal communication.

Start using AI for the work that doesn't scale:

• Write first drafts of cross-functional updates
• Summarize meeting recordings into action items
• Draft recap emails and campaign brief outlines
• Turn messy project notes into structured documents

Build an "AI template bank" for tasks you repeat weekly. Press release skeletons, sales follow-up emails, campaign memos, project kickoff docs. Stop starting from scratch every time.

The teams winning with AI aren't just using it for customer-facing content. They're using it to cut through internal noise and reclaim time for strategy.

Where the Smart Teams Are Gaining Time Back

Let's zoom out for a second. Marketing teams spend more time communicating than the average knowledge worker. We're the most communication-heavy function in most companies. And yet we're using AI primarily for external content while drowning in internal busywork.

That's backwards.

The most effective marketing teams are treating AI like a productivity multiplier, not a content generator. Here's what they're doing right now:

For daily communication:

• Draft internal updates faster. Instead of spending 30 minutes crafting a project status email, dump your bullet points into AI and get a polished draft in 2 minutes.
• Clean up cross-functional communication. That rambling message thread with the sales team? AI can turn it into clear, actionable points.
• Write better recap emails. Post-meeting summaries that actually capture decisions and next steps, not just attendance.

For content production:

• Turn ideas into outlines instantly. Stop staring at blank documents. Feed AI your campaign goals and get a structure to build from.
• Draft internal FAQs and briefs. Those documents everyone needs but no one wants to write? AI handles the first draft.
• Convert messy docs into presentation slides. Transform that 10-page strategy document into a 3-slide deck for executives.

For brand consistency:

• Catch tone issues before they go live. AI can flag when your campaign copy doesn't match brand voice guidelines.
• Ensure message consistency across channels. Same core message, optimized for email vs. social vs. web.

Choose one weekly task you normally have a mental block on and test an AI-first workflow. Maybe it's writing campaign retrospectives, maybe it's drafting quarterly planning docs. Pick something that usually takes 2+ hours and see if AI can cut that in half.

Stop starting from scratch. Every document type should have a reusable format. AI can generate these templates faster than you can find last quarter's version buried in Google Drive.

Think about your last major campaign launch. How much time did you spend on the creative strategy versus writing status emails about the creative strategy? How many hours went into the actual campaign versus documenting the campaign for stakeholders who couldn't make the meetings?

The real productivity breakthrough comes when AI handles the operational overhead that surrounds your core marketing work. Instead of spending Friday afternoon writing a campaign recap that summarizes what everyone already knows, you spend it analyzing performance data and planning optimizations. Instead of crafting the perfect email to explain why the timeline shifted, you're focused on solving the actual timeline issue.

The goal isn't to replace human creativity. It's to eliminate the grunt work that keeps you from being creative in the first place.

The teams gaining real competitive advantage aren't the ones using AI to write better Instagram captions. They're the ones using it to eliminate communication friction and focus on strategy.

Kill the Noise, Do the Work

Here's the truth: Marketing isn't about being available. It's about being effective.

AI is one tool to cut through the noise, but the shift needs to happen at the workflow level. We need to stop rewarding responsiveness and start rewarding results. We need to question whether that meeting needs to happen, whether that update needs to be written, whether that Slack thread actually requires your input.

The most productive marketing teams are obsessed with eliminating low-value work. They automate what can be automated, templatize what gets repeated, and stop doing things that don't matter.

Pick 3 things to automate, templatize, or stop doing entirely. Write them down. Do them this month. Examples:

• Automate: Weekly performance reports
• Templatize: Campaign brief formats
• Stop doing: Status meetings that could be async updates

Use data as ammunition for change. The next time your team lead schedules another "quick sync," show them the research: "Hey, we're wasting 7.5 hours per week on busywork and 4.6 hours on poor communication. Can we try a different approach?"

The goal isn't to eliminate all communication. It's to make the communication that remains actually matter. AI can help with that, but only if we're willing to change how we work.

Marketing is creative work disguised as administrative work. Let's fix that.