Given the dire state of our 401K’s, savings, pensions and the price of our houses, retirement which once seemed a long way off has ridden off into the sunset on a stolen horse. While many have been worrying, I have been continuing to plan for my early departure from the work farce however this time I plan to do it while still collecting a pay check.

Now we have entered the age of Obama, or the Obamaera, I have decided like all good Obamerites to lay out a multi-step plan for success. It will sound simple, while at the same time be so incomprehensibly detailed your employer will never be able to see through it. I call this Geithneromics. Due to my current focus I will start by helping marketers join me in this quest, I may help sales people in the future, though I will be selective. Those that helped themselves for the last decade, riding high in corporate jets, collecting fat bonuses and generally living it up will have to help themselves as all the additional thought I have had to put was wearing. The secret to success is to do more with less but not be seen to be doing anything differently.

Rule #1 – Be in when you are out.

Buy the following items to leave in your office.

Identical Blackberry to your regular one – you don’t need a plan, just a phone (please see Rule #4)

3 spare jackets

Laptop

You must leave the Blackberry and your laptop plugged in at all times, leave your jacket on the back of the chair. This way when anyone comes by your office (OK, I know. That is so last century. When they come by your open plan, open topped, not-a-cube more of a “zone”; it will appear you have just run out. Who leaves their Blackberry behind or without their jacket? You will need to move the items whenever you are in the office and occasionally swap out the jacket. This not only allows you to appear as if you are in the office, in addition you appear to work early and late.

Rule #2 – Say you are triaging leads old school but don’t.

Print out lots of leads from your salesfarce automation system. Get a magic marker and randomly write “A”, “B”, “C”, in the upper right hand corner of the first 20 or so in the pile. If you want to do well at our next HR review, come up with a color code, red for “A”, orange for “B”, etc. You will appear really efficient; color-coding? This person’s a genius, give them a bonus. Now the good news is people expect this process to take forever and be a full time job so if you automate it using a tool like Marketbright you can tell people you are manually updating your salesfarce automation system while it actually happens automatically while you are sitting on the beach.

Rule #3 – Re-use content mercilessly.

Use a marketing automation system that is template-centric and provides for re-use of content. When you are creating nurture emails, re-use and re-purpose the same content. You know less than 2% of the people are reading it, they aren’t going to notice if it is the same content they didn’t read last time. Those people who are reading them are only reading the subject lines anyway. This is a tremendous time-saver and if your vendor has the world’s best HTML editor and a template-based approach, you can even edit the content a little and do what used to take your agency months in a few minutes.

Rule #4 – Get a Blackberry.

I am sure it is true of iPhone’s too in terms of functionality, but in terms of looking like you mean business a Blackberry is invaluable. The key to the success for this plan I propose is looking like you live, breathe and mean business. Putting TwitterBerry, Facebook, LinkedIn and all other social media applications on a Blackberry couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do now is take the content you post on one, and re-post it everywhere else. Personally I recommend setting up a work alias for all these accounts and just having these logins on your “post-work still-paycheck” Blackberry. Then you don’t run the risk of Twittering, “Just dropped my Blackberry as my hands are greasy with sun lotion.”

Rule #5 – Funding the project.

We all know marketing has the most fungible budget of virtually any department. Always amuses me that sales has zero budget but all the headcount, and marketing has all the budget but relatively little headcount. This is a huge asset to you in your attempt to be on the beach while collecting a paycheck. (By the way, you don’t actually need to go to the beach, this is just an idea. You may want to walk in the park, go to a quilting festival, or run naked through the woods. It is not really important, other than the last one as a) you don’t have anywhere to easily put your Blackberry; which is a critical part of appearing to be perma-on-line and b) if you are going to do this please let me know in advance and whether you are attractive or not as that will dictate whether I avoid said woods or not.) The fungibility (Ahh, you have to love it when marketing makes up new words.) of your budget means you can implement a system to deliver Rules #2, #3 and #4, and so long as you put it under “Trade Show” or “Agency” in your budget, no-one will ever know.

I hope you find this helpful. I certainly have found it to be so. I am currently on a beach in Barbados, though if you check in my office I think I may have just popped out for lunch.