Ah, the Easter long weekend. A glorious mirage of chocolate, hot cross buns, and uninterrupted days of blissful ignorance.
But if you work in media, marketing, advertising, or tech… you know the dark truth. A four-day work week usually just means hyperventilating your way through five days of work in 20% less time.
Now, thanks to the scheduling gods, we sit right in the thick of the Easter double squeeze.
And I will be perfectly candid here. This first short week thoroughly cooked my own time management, so I’m only getting these productivity tips to you on a Thursday.
My bad. I fully grasp the irony of delivering an efficiency guide late.
So, while I might only half help you handle this year’s immediate Easter chaos, you should bookmark this for next year. For now, let’s focus on salvaging next week.
If your current survival strategy involves mainlining espresso and hoping the client forgets about that brief until Tuesday, you need to pivot.
Here’s how Australia’s top productivity experts tell you to survive the incoming four-day sprint, and how you can magically carve out some time to complete your Next of the Best awards submission.
Be like Chris Ernst, chief practice officer, media & managing director of Dentsu Australia, and enter the awards. You’ll thank yourself later. Image: file
Stop treating busy like a KPI
The media industry loves a hero. We wear back-to-back schedules and overflowing inboxes like badges of honour.
But time management expert Kate Christie, who tackles modern burnout and time investment, has a harsh truth for you. “Busy isn’t a badge of honour, it’s a red flag,” Christie says.
Her philosophy dictates that in today’s always-on culture, we need to stop managing time and start investing it.
Next week, look at your to-do list with a ruthless, cynical eye. Does that task actually drive the campaign forward, or are you mistaking motion for momentum?
If it doesn’t move the needle, drop it, delegate it, or push it to late April.
You literally cannot fit a 40-hour week into 32 hours without dropping something. Choose what drops before it chooses you.
Eradicate toxic urgency
Client panic spreads like a virus. One email with a red exclamation mark lands in the inbox, and suddenly the whole team runs around like a headless chook.
Adapt Productivity founder Dermot Crowley calls this modern workplace epidemic “toxic urgency.”
Crowley notes that digital tools drive today’s professionals into a state of constant, reactive chaos. His advice? Centralise your tasks so you don’t manage your day out of your inbox.
Stop treating every Slack or Teams ping like a fire alarm.
Batch-check your messages, turn off the pop-up notifications, and shift from a reactive scramble to a responsive, calculated workflow.
A client’s lack of planning shouldn’t constitute your emergency.
Set guardrails and build your off-ramps
Client panic follows you from your office desk straight to your living room via Slack.
Leading Australian researcher on digital wellbeing Dr. Kristy Goodwin notes that our hybrid tech habits fundamentally clash with our neurobiology, leading to severe “techno-exhaustion.”
What does she advise for the Easter squeeze? Set unapologetic digital guardrails. Close your inbox and mute your notifications for 60-minute blocks to get actual work done.
Furthermore, Goodwin advocates that professionals build deliberate cognitive on-ramps to start the day with focus, and establish strict off-ramps at the end of it.
If you don’t create a clear off-ramp on Thursday afternoon, the agency blur will follow you straight into the long weekend.
Stop playing meeting Tetris
When a short week hits, the default agency panic response takes five days of WIPs, catch-ups, and brainstorms and simply crams them into four days.
Organizational psychologist and How I Work podcast host Dr. Amantha Imber warns that this relentless context-switching will absolutely fry your brain before next Friday even arrives.
Imber heavily advocates auditing your week and shifting to asynchronous communication.
Next week, look at your calendar and ask yourself if a task actually requires a live meeting, or if a shared Google Doc, a Loom video, or a tightly worded email could suffice.
Stop playing meeting Tetris. Protect your deep work time fiercely.
If you want to survive the short week, you have to stop collaborating on things that do not require collaboration.
Claim what you do with your saved time
Now let’s say you actually listen to these experts. You ditch the toxic urgency, set your guardrails, stop playing meeting Tetris, and refuse to wear the ‘I’m very, very busy’ badge of honour. Suddenly, you buy back a few hours next week.
Do not, under any circumstances, use that time to do more client work!
Instead, invest it in your own career.
Use your newly freed-up time to finalise your entry for Mediaweek’s Next of the Best Awards.
You spent the last 12 months dealing with moving goalposts, shrinking budgets, and chaotic deadlines. Don’t let a compressed calendar stop you from claiming the recognition you deserve. Enter here.
Enforce your off-ramps, get your submission in, and go eat your body weight in leftover chocolate.
You earned it.