The worlds of public relations, marketing, and advertising are hectic at the best of times — and frenetic at the worst. As a PR professional, you must keep multiple tasks and projects in order and to do this, organization — and lack of distraction — is essential.
If you don’t think that’s true, consider this — 69% of professionals waste an hour a day moving among apps, with nearly the same number toggling from app to app nearly ten times each hour. Add that tendency to the need for PR professionals to be in constant communication with colleagues, customers, and outsourced services and things can get challenging. In fact, a recent survey shows that 70% of you are overwhelmed by the amount of work communication required.
The key to avoiding this overwhelm and increasing your overall productivity is to keep yourself organized. Reducing time spent searching for critical information, contact names, and important documents can help you focus more clearly on work tasks and increase your ability to handle more than one project with aplomb. In this article, we have curated some of our favorite tips and technologies that can help support the busy PR professional.
Organizational Tech and Other Tools to Keep PR Pros Productive
Fortunately, with help from software, applications, and good common sense, you can get a handle on your many projects and become more productive, just by adding one or more of the following tips into your workday.
Make a Schedule
Whether you’re in marketing, advertising, or public relations, you probably have a number of projects on your plate at the same time. While this is unavoidable, it is also easy to handle with the right organization skills. Skill one? Making a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule for each project and sticking with it.
Software like Slack, Trello, and others can help you organize in-project tasks for each specific job and prioritize them for better outcomes. In addition to your project schedule, you’ll want to employ a daily schedule that can help narrow your focus. For example, you can work on press releases on Mondays and advertising specs on Tuesdays. Or you could carve out mornings for newsjacking and pitching while leaving your afternoons free for more creative work.
Turn Off Notifications
Notifications and other pop ups are a threat to productivity. All of those apps you’re using to streamline your project tasks want to send you notifications of activity. While this may seem like a good thing, it can be distracting and counterproductive when you’re knee deep in creative planning. Consider turning them off or setting them so you only get them when a specific keyword, such as your name, is mentioned.
Use Technology to Stay Organized
If you’re like 85% of employees, you probably spend one or two hours — or more — each week searching for the right documentation to move forward with your projects. That’s where document management solutions (DMS) can help you stay organized and on track. A DMS is, at its core, an intelligent software solution that helps archive, organize, share, edit, track, and secure any and all documents across all of your projects — closed and active. Using any search terms you designate — from key words to key phrases, dates, project numbers, project leaders, client name or any others — you can easily find everything associated with your project with just a click or two. And, DMS allows for version control and tracking of documents so you can see what changes were made, by whom, and when to keep modifications straight. Finally, a DMS provides an additional layer of security to protect any sensitive information shared by your clients or in your company’s possession, keeping you compliant with any data privacy and security regulations.
Blue Technologies Has Robust Document Management Solutions to Keep You on Target
By nature, the worlds of advertising, marketing, and public relations are always busy — and so are the professionals working in them. Keeping multiple projects in the air at the same time can be a daunting task — one that can contribute to frustration and even workplace burnout.
By taking advantage of some of our tips — and adding document management software to your technology toolkit — you and your firm can experience amplified productivity while reducing stress and pressure. At Blue Technologies, we have curated the best document management solutions that can be completely customized for your firm to streamline processes and help you handle the multitude of tasks you undertake every day better, faster, and more confidently.
