Why Your Best Marketer Spends 60% of Time on Admin
You hired a talented content marketer. Great portfolio. Sharp strategic thinking. Exactly what your team needed.
Six months later, they spend most of their day updating Asana, chasing approvals in Slack, and reformatting the same content for five different channels.
This is not a performance problem. It is a systems problem.
The Talent Waste Problem
Research from Asana shows knowledge workers spend only 27% of their time on skilled work. The rest goes to “work about work”: coordination, status updates, searching for information.
For marketers, this means your $80K-120K creative hire spends roughly $50K-70K worth of their time on admin.
| Activity | % of Time | Salary Equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Skilled work (what you hired them for) | 27% | $27K |
| Coordination and meetings | 29% | $29K |
| Searching for information | 14% | $14K |
| Communication overhead | 16% | $16K |
| Other admin | 14% | $14K |
You are paying senior marketer rates for junior admin tasks.
What “Admin” Actually Looks Like
Let us break down a typical day for a content marketer on a small team.
Morning (9am-12pm)
- 9:00: Check Slack, respond to overnight messages (30 min)
- 9:30: Daily standup (15 min)
- 9:45: Update project status in Asana (20 min)
- 10:05: Search for the latest brand guidelines (15 min)
- 10:20: Actually start writing blog post (40 min)
- 11:00: Meeting about upcoming campaign (45 min)
- 11:45: Respond to more Slack messages (15 min)
Afternoon (1pm-5pm)
- 1:00: Continue blog post (45 min)
- 1:45: Reformat blog content for email newsletter (30 min)
- 2:15: Create social posts from blog content (30 min)
- 2:45: Route everything for approval in three different tools (20 min)
- 3:05: Weekly marketing sync (60 min)
- 4:05: Chase down approvals that are blocking (25 min)
- 4:30: Make revisions based on feedback (30 min)
- 5:00: Final Slack catch-up (30 min)
The math:
- Actual content creation: 2 hours 25 minutes
- Everything else: 5 hours 35 minutes
That is 30% creation, 70% admin. And this is a productive day.
Why Small Teams Get Hit Hardest
Enterprise marketing departments have dedicated roles to absorb this overhead:
| Role | What They Handle |
|---|---|
| Marketing Ops | Tools, automation, data |
| Project Manager | Coordination, timelines, status |
| Content Coordinator | Approvals, routing, publishing |
| Marketing Admin | Scheduling, reporting, logistics |
Small teams have none of these roles. The same person who writes the copy also manages the tools, coordinates the approvals, and publishes the content.
Everyone does operations on top of their “real” job. Nothing gets proper attention.
The Hidden Cost: When your best creative talent spends 60% of time on admin, you are not just wasting salary. You are wasting the ideas, strategies, and campaigns that never get created because there is no time left.
The Compounding Effect
Admin work does not just steal time. It fragments attention.
Research on context switching shows it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption. If your marketer switches between creative work and admin tasks 10 times per day, that is nearly 4 hours of lost productivity from switching alone.
| Switches per Day | Focus Time Lost |
|---|---|
| 5 switches | 1.9 hours |
| 10 switches | 3.8 hours |
| 15 switches | 5.75 hours |
Creative work requires sustained focus. Admin work fragments it. The two are fundamentally incompatible in the same role.
What Gets Sacrificed
When marketers spend 60% on admin, something has to give. Usually it is the highest-value work:
| What Gets Done | What Gets Sacrificed |
|---|---|
| Urgent requests | Strategic planning |
| Status updates | Deep creative work |
| Reactive campaigns | Proactive campaigns |
| Maintaining existing | Building new |
| Reporting on past | Planning for future |
Your team stays busy. But busy on the wrong things.
The Burnout Connection
Marketing has one of the highest burnout rates among professions. A 2023 study found 83% of marketers report experiencing burnout.
The conventional explanation is workload. But workload alone does not cause burnout. Research shows burnout correlates more strongly with:
- Lack of control over work
- Insufficient reward for effort
- Mismatch between work and values
Admin overload hits all three:
- Marketers cannot control the coordination demands
- Creative work feels unrewarded when buried in admin
- They signed up to do marketing, not project management
Reducing admin is not just an efficiency play. It is a retention play.
What Actually Helps
1. Audit Where Time Actually Goes
Before fixing the problem, measure it. Have your team track time for one week across categories:
- Creative/strategic work
- Meetings
- Tool management
- Communication
- Searching for information
- Approvals and coordination
The numbers will be uncomfortable. That is the point.
2. Consolidate Tools
Every tool boundary creates admin overhead. If your team uses separate tools for docs, project management, communication, email marketing, and social scheduling, that is five systems to update for every campaign.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Google Docs + Notion + Asana + Slack + HubSpot + Buffer | Fewer tools with native integrations |
Fewer tools means fewer handoffs means less admin.
3. Create Templates and Playbooks
If you run the same type of campaign more than twice, templatize it:
- Campaign brief templates
- Content formatting templates
- Approval checklists
- Reporting templates
Stop recreating the same admin work every time.
4. Automate Handoffs
The biggest admin sink is manual coordination between steps:
| Manual | Automated |
|---|---|
| ”Can you review this?” | Auto-notify when ready |
| ”What is the status?” | Real-time dashboard |
| Copy content between tools | Automated sync |
| Manual reformatting | Template-based generation |
When handoffs happen automatically, admin overhead drops.
5. Protect Creative Time
Block dedicated time for deep work. No meetings. No Slack. No admin.
Even two hours of protected creative time per day would double most marketers’ actual output.
The Goal: Flip the Ratio
The current state for most small teams:
- 30-40% skilled work
- 60-70% admin and coordination
The target state:
- 60-70% skilled work
- 30-40% admin and coordination
For a three-person team, flipping this ratio is equivalent to adding 1.5 headcount worth of creative output. Same salaries. Same people. Different systems.
Key Takeaways
| Problem | Solution |
|---|---|
| Talent buried in admin | Audit and measure time allocation |
| Too many tools | Consolidate to reduce switching |
| Repeated manual work | Templatize common workflows |
| Manual handoffs | Automate coordination |
| Fragmented attention | Protect creative time blocks |
The Bottom Line
Your best marketer is not underperforming. They are under-supported.
When 60% of their time goes to admin, you are paying for talent you are not using. The fix is not hiring more people to do more admin. It is eliminating the admin so your existing talent can do what you hired them for.
The companies that figure this out will get twice the output from the same team. The ones that do not will keep wondering why their great hires feel overwhelmed and eventually leave.
Ready to Free Your Team from Admin?
Marqeable builds AI agents that handle marketing workflow coordination automatically. So your talented marketers can focus on the creative and strategic work they were hired to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do marketers spend so much time on admin work?
Small marketing teams lack dedicated ops roles to handle coordination. Without someone to manage tools, processes, and handoffs, every marketer absorbs admin work on top of their core job. Research shows 60% of knowledge worker time goes to coordination rather than skilled work.
What counts as marketing admin work?
Marketing admin includes status meetings, updating project management tools, searching for files and information, switching between tools, chasing approvals, reformatting content for different channels, and manual reporting. None of this is strategy or creative work.
How can marketing teams reduce admin burden?
Three approaches: consolidate tools to reduce context switching, create templates and playbooks for repeatable work, and automate handoffs between workflow steps. The goal is freeing talent to do the work they were hired for.
Related Resources
The 60% Tax: How Small Marketing Teams Lose Their Week
Where your time actually goes.
Why Your 3-Person Marketing Team Feels Like 0.5
The coordination tax explained.
What Enterprise Marketing Teams Know That You Don’t
How larger teams handle the ops burden.
About Marqeable
Marqeable builds AI marketing agents that autonomously execute content workflows while you focus on strategy and creativity.
