As a PR specialist, you will be caught up in the maelstrom of clients, activities, and communications all at once. Time is a precious resource in such conditions, but there are many factors that make things seem too much sometimes.
Having several clients whose attention requires your focus from various directions, having deadlines and dealing with unexpected cases, your daily schedule is constantly changing. To be able to organize it properly, you need to know how to improve your productivity and be a good time manager.
There are four main tips that will help you to do it successfully.
1. Make sensible job priorities
Improved prioritisation is correlated with increased productivity. Your productivity is greatly impacted by the sequence in which you decide to do your duties, whether it be due to urgency, complexity, or importance.
The following are some suggestions that will assist you, as a PR professional, to prioritize:
Important vs. Urgent: In the first place, classify your tasks in four categories such as: neither urgent nor important; important but not urgent; urgent but not important; and urgent and important. Based on the ideas of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, you can draw the Eisenhower Matrix (given below) on a two-axis graph.
2. Make use of time management strategies and tools
Knowing how you’re spending your working hours helps you plan your schedule for maximum productivity, even though you don’t have to monitor every minute of your workday. And for this, choose from the many time management tools that are currently accessible in addition to the task management applications listed above:
Time-tracking software: With the help of such programs as Controlio, Toggl, factoHR, and Clockify, you can observe your time utilization while working. These applications can provide you with information about effective and ineffective spending of your time. In case you manage a team of PR professionals or any other employees, it will be possible for you to keep track of everyone with the help of employee monitoring software Controlio, which allows observing daily activities, timesheets, and productivity.
Calendar applications: To organize your work, tasks, and reminders, there are digital calendars such as Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. For the sake of convenience, synchronize them between different devices.
To-do lists and applications: In order to have everything under control, you can create a to-do list and get notifications with the help of such applications as Todoist and Wunderlist.
Timesheet applications: There is an opportunity for you to utilize a free online timesheet application for better workload management and responsibility.
3. Develop your delegation skills
Do not try to handle everything yourself if you have a busy schedule. Multitasking in this way will eventually lead to burnout, along with being unproductive. Delegation of tasks is an effective technique that can completely transform your efficiency as a PR professional.
4. Establish a regimented daily schedule
Designing your schedule can be considered paradoxical due to the nature of PR as being uncertain. However, it is the unpredictability of PR that can be used to your advantage in order to be efficient and consistent in completing the task. Below are the steps that can be used in order to design your daily schedule:
First, develop your morning routine: Create your morning routine so that you can begin your day. The morning routine consists of such aspects as doing exercises, meditating, or even having a healthy breakfast.
Second, figure out the Most Important Task (MIT): Figure out what the Most Important Task is for you to do that particular day.