Time Stamped vs. WorkFluid
Why the future of creative partnership isn’t transactional, it’s relational and rhythmic by design.
In the traditional agency model, time is currency. An hour is measured, billed, and logged and ‘time’ is the product. This legacy approach, borrowed from legal and consulting firms, assumes that value lies in volume and that the more hours spent, the more value delivered. But in today’s fast-evolving landscape, this model is tired. Because what clients are truly procuring isn’t just time, they’re buying trust, insight, perspective and ultimately, years of experience distilled into ideas and delivery.
When time is treated as the sole unit of value, the work becomes a transaction, output over outcome and often, activity over impact. This equation doesn’t reflect the true nature of modern creative work. It doesn’t account for intuition, relational depth or the ability to hold and navigate complexity. Nor does it recognise the invisible labour of thinking, iterating and refining. That quiet moment on a walk when the big idea drops in, the years of lived experience and time on tools that shapes a single sentence. And don’t forget the nuance of knowing when not to say something.
Time may be the world’s currency, but it was never meant to measure imagination.
Great work isn’t just made in the hours logged. It’s made in the spaces between, in reflection, in lived experience, the collection of knowledge and the expression of this that translates into embodied wisdom. For so long we have been slaves to our timesheets, if you started in the industry in the 90’s like some of us, you might remember the more archaic ways of tracking time, hello excel and JCR’s (job cost reports). Often populated at the end of the week/month, in rush when finance were calling for your time to be on billed. Not much has changed, except the tech. We now have a plethora of different apps with both desktop and mobile interfaces to track our every working moment. Maybe our tracking and certainly the process has become less time consuming and more accurate but fundamentally nothing has changed in all those years, we are still selling time.
But we live in a time-based realm, how can it be about anything but time? When time is the invisible scaffolding of our lives and commerce is built on its quantification, what is the alternative?
As a team with a distinct mission of rewriting an outdated playbook, we have tried for some time to resolve and progress the tension we feel between the acceptable norm of ‘selling time’ and the values we hold around our work, creativity and what we offer to our clients that we see as far more valuable than just time. Recently as we birthed our new offerings and built on the foundations of our strategic storytelling process we decided it was time to confront it once and for all and find a glade in the forest where we could rest in this new, clearly articulated space where time and value are one.
The challenge isn’t time itself — it’s our relationship with it.
When we thought about reinventing how we charge for creative or strategic work, we knew we were not just rewriting budgets, contracts or cost scenarios. We’re brushing up against the fabric of how we value everything in our economic system. Many before us have tried, outcomes based projects, dangerous guarantees on results (impossible in an uncontrollable world), concept development fees aka lofty quotes for unqualifiable ideas and more.
These outcome-based models mostly fail in practice, they sound appealing to clients, even revolutionary, but they don’t reconcile with how business or humans actually function. We are creatures bound by time, by the Gregorian calendar and this underlying idea of past, present and future. So given that we are unlikely (although my BIG revolutionary inner voice would like to think we can) to change how we measure our days, our efforts, our worth and rather than allow calendars, clocks and the choreography of progress to rule we see the most obvious path is to shift our very relationship with time. To respect it as the universal measure of our value but rather than let time and its trackers be our overlords we have created a new way of relating to it. Creating a new considered and deliberate relationship with time that honours the cycles of nature, humanity as a collective but also most importantly our individuality. It has seen us looking at our waking and working hours and addressing how we use them consciously, with our deep desire to rebalance the scales in favour of life. So you ask, what does this actually mean, how does it play out in our day to day?
The pillars of this new way of being include some proprietary actions…like courageous conversations, circadian chronotypes, personal preference playbooks, deep work windows (thanks for the inspo Cal Newport) and our own ‘deep cleaning’. How we show up requires what we call radical transparency and it asks us to think more deeply about what we want personally out of our jobs, and above that out of our day to day and how this reconciles with our work. Note that at Mkt. we are all really passionate about what we do (we renamed it commercial storytelling) and know that this is the only starting point we will succeed from, if you don’t love your role/job/industry then you need to get off the bus and find a new map.
Change won’t come from rewriting contracts, but from reimagining relationships
We have come to learn that the greatest currency we have is our attention (the term ‘Attention economy’ confirms this) and where we direct it informs our lived experience, it shapes how we view life and ultimately determines the quality of our relationships. What are we without our relationships and the stories created by being ‘in relationship’ with the world, with humans, animals, nature and our own inner worlds?
So in this time matrix that we live in, and in the interest of trialling new and different ways of working we created what we call “workfluid”. It involves deliberately and consciously directing our attention based on our needs and those of our clients and gives preference always to the quality of our relationships.
WorkFluid is Mkt.’s living philosophy of how we work, with clients, within our team and with our broader creative collective. It recognises that work is not a rigid structure but a fluid, evolving ecosystem where flexibility meets accountability and creativity is nurtured through relationships that hold trust, clarity and care at the core.
In a WorkFluid model, value is not calculated solely by time. It considers the strategic clarity, cultural insight and creative resonance we bring to the table. This is not an argument against structure, we honour scope, timelines and deliverables. But we also honour rhythm, readiness and the space required for ideas to emerge and solutions to be crafted. So how exactly do we do this you ask?
It starts with a deliberate effort to understand how best our individual team members work. Are they larks or early birds? Do they have a family and need to modify traditional working hours and locations to thrive? How are we working as a collective that leaves each of us with enough in the ‘cup’ at the end of each day so we have energy left for our families, friends and personal pursuits? This also applies to our clients and through our onboarding process we ensure we understand how our clients like to work and what their daily/weekly rhythms look like.
We live WorkFluid through rhythm, tools and collaboration that support real flow. Our working cadence blends deep work with team-led sessions, purposeful-pauses, working walks designed to reset and re-connect. We embrace WorkFluid Fridays (formally known as Freedom Fridays), encourage Wellness Pass moments, and create space for Courageous Conversations that strengthen connection and trust. We also work in tune with our chronotypes, respecting different energy peaks and creative rhythms to help everyone perform at their best, not just as it relates to work but considers the energy left at the end of the work day that determines how they show up as a mother, father, partner, sister, friend.
We use our proprietary living communications compass PureVoice to keep communication clear and human (more about that on our website and in another article), and AI thoughtfully, to support thinking rather than replace it. Collaboration is fluid, shaped by flexible Story Check-Ins, client office mornings and regular feedback loops that keep everyone connected and relationships strong.
Strong relationships don’t just support great work, they become it.
Clients who work with us in this way experience more than a traditional project model. They enter into a collaborative rhythm built on co-creation and trust it’s why we have some of the longest client tenures in the industry. I remember a client who was on gardening leave and was regularly using our office said to us, “I’m not sure what is going on here, I can’t quite put my finger on what is so different about how you work and relate to each other, but it is”. It really started at the start, with a mission to create the agency we wanted to work for, be the boss we wanted to have and being really clear about the values and behaviours that brought this vision to life. From the very beginning we set out to relate differently, both internally and with our clients and external partners. We did this in small ways everyday and in bigger ways through the larger decisions we made along our journey, including becoming one of the first B Corporations in Australia (and just certified for the fourth time).
The work we do is not linear. It’s alchemical and it draws on intuition as much as intellect. We have long said to our team that we do not employ people to sit at desks, we employ our team to use their knowledge and wisdom to deliver outstanding work for our clients.
What clients are investing in is not a fixed unit of time or people at desks in set time windows. They are engaging a fluid collection of capabilities. It can’t be neatly captured in a timesheet even in the greatest new productivity app. In a climate defined by complexity, clients are seeking much more than a transactional partner. They need collaborators who can show up in this dynamic and supercharged operating environment with agility, empathy and well crafted solutions.
Revaluing the value behind time and why this matters now…
The old metrics of productivity are giving way to new measures and we are putting greater value on the relationships as the springboard and bridge to high quality work. workfluid is underpinned by the idea that not all hours are created equal. That a 10-minute insight can be more valuable than 10 hours of output. That wisdom arrives not on schedule but in the space in between. Perhaps it’s in the moments where we take an unscheduled break, follow our intuition and take a day off or maybe it’s a 3am download, some of us night owls are familiar with these late night idea sparks.
The future of agency partnerships isn’t time-stamped, it’s time-fluid or as we say, WorkFluid. It’s measured in depth rather than duration, it shows up as resonance not just reach and ultimately it is seen in creative ideas, solutions and exceptional delivery not just timesheets and productivity boards. This way of working invites a new kind of relationship, one that is more human and collaborative. While we are far from solving this challenging industry wide tension and the greater issues the world faces around hustle culture, we think we’ve made a start.
We heard a prediction a few years ago about a new mega trend, ‘the BIG slow down’. Even after the recalibration that the covid pandemic provided us, we are not seeing evidence of this predicted slowing down. Moreover we are seeing the post pandemic ‘working from home’ shift create more stress, less collaboration and new levels of distrust and cultural erosion in corporations big and small. Through our endless pursuit to ‘find a better way’, we are consciously choosing elements of slow and fluid in our everyday and sharing how we do it with our clients and collaborators in the hope that it will be the new contagion to which there is no antidote required.
The creative industry doesn’t need another productivity revolution; it needs a relational one. One that devalues hustle culture, dials up trust and seeks to deepen relationships in order to create higher quality outcomes. workfluid is our experiment in that evolution, part of what we call the Alchemy of Mkt….a living system that restores humanity to the heart of work.
We like to say we’re reimagining the journey one story at a time. And it starts, as all good stories do, right here.