If you work in public relations, you know the work is often not as glamorous as it’s presented on TV and in the movies. There are a lot of meetings, writing assignments, emails, and—more often than not—long hours.
With all the tasks and responsibilities that come with this position, it’s important to learn the very best productivity tips for PR professionals and put them into practice every single day.
Tackle these productivity habits with some of the best tools for PR professionals on the market today, and you’ll finally get some after-work activities on your calendar.
Ready to ramp up your PR productivity? Then you’ll find these productivity tips and tools extremely helpful:
The best productivity tips for PR professionals
Tip #1: Develop better email habits
Do you know that on average we check our email every 5 minutes? That’s 96 times a day! This is what the people from Hiri learned when reviewing studies in corporate emailing.
While it’s important to stay on top of your email correspondence and respond in a timely fashion, a small shift can have a big impact on your productivity.
The PR productivity tool: Hiri
Hiri is an email client that can save you precious time with a few simple features. For example, you can organize your emails based on the actions they require. You have two filters for this: an actionable filter for emails that require further actions and an FYI filter for informational emails. This way, you can prioritize and devote your time to handling emails that call for a swift response or action.
You can also drag and drop emails to the to-do list and create tasks for yourself or delegate the work to a colleague. A calendar, reminders, and a contacts list are also available in Hiri, so you have everything in one place.
Perhaps the most useful feature of Hiri is the reminder NOT to check your emails so often and wait for a given period. Usually, there’s really no need to refresh the mailbox every 5 minutes and interrupt your PR workflow, so this feature is a favorite.
Tip #2: Organize and prioritize your tasks daily
Having a lot of different tasks to complete during the day can be hard to handle sometimes, especially if you don’t organize them well.
Avoid being overwhelmed by getting a handle on your full to-do list and managing your tasks proactively.
The PR productivity tool: Week Plan
Looking at one, long to-do list can stop you in your tracks. However, if you prioritize them and sort them by importance and urgency, you’ll know exactly where to begin. A great tool that can help with all this is called Week Plan.
Week Plan allows you to list all the tasks for the week and organize them into different groups based on the Eisenhower Urgent/Important Principle:
- Important & urgent
- Important & not urgent
- Not important & urgent
- Not important & not urgent
Also, with this tool, you get something called the Parking Lot—where you can write down ideas you want to get back to later—as well as the Pomodoro timer that will help you focus on your tasks.
For those of you who don’t know what Pomodoro is, it’s a time management technique that can gamify your work. It’s based on the 25 + 5 minutes principle: you focus on an individual task for 25 minutes without interruptions and then take a 5-minute break.
During those 5 minute breaks, you step away from your computer and do something that is not work-related, so you can easily focus back on the task when your break ends.
Tip #3: Manage your PR tasks in a PR CRM
Daily tasks like press release writing and media pitching are regular and recurring work for PR professionals, but they quickly become overwhelming if not managed properly. Even a good-intentioned and well-built system of shared Google Sheets can feel messy within a PR team.
Add in the time needed for regular email and Zoom updates with your colleagues about the status of each client account, and it’s easy to see that there has to be a better way.
The PR productivity tool: Prowly
PR software like Prowly simply puts your team’s PR tasks in just one place. Users log into the system to create press releases with embedded photos and logos, build online newsrooms to visually highlight clients, create media lists by type and topic, and send pitch emails with open rate analytics!
On top of the ability to keep all of your work in one place, it eliminates the need for constant teammate updates. Instead, anyone logging into the system can see exactly where you left off, making shared account work a breeze.
Tip #4: Block out distractions
Public relations goes hand-in-hand with social media today, but let’s face it—you don’t need to use social media networks all the time.
But sometimes we check our social media profiles without even realizing what we’re doing! Social media has become such a big part of our lives that we need tools to stop us from checking them too often.
If you need to focus on a certain task but don’t trust yourself with the online temptation to scroll social networks, there are apps that can help you block out online distractions.
The PR productivity tool: StayFocusd
A great tool you could use is StayFocusd. It’s a plugin for Google Chrome that limits the time you spend on certain websites or completely blocks others. It’s completely customizable when it comes to sites you want to limit and the time you want to spend avoiding them. You could also try the Freedom app for iPhone and ClearLock for Android.
Tip #5: Stay informed about current events
A PR professional’s job is to know what’s going on in the news, so you should always be informed about current events. We all have our trusted sources of information, and we know how time-consuming it is to check them one by one. That’s what news aggregators do so well for us: they collect news from different sources and present them to us in one place.
The PR productivity tool: Flipboard
One of the best and most popular news aggregators today is definitely Flipboard. It allows you to choose your areas of interest and the topics on which you want to receive news. You can even integrate social media news feeds so the information you get is highly personalized and relevant.
Another great feature of Flipboard is the ability to create your own magazines that can be public or private. This is amazing for organizing blogs and articles based on the subject. You can even add news to your magazines if you come across an article you find useful and want to save it for further reading or research.
Flipboard is available for both iOS and Android and in website form. You can even add the + Flip it button to your browser and make it even easier to save important news and blogs. If you’re not a fan of Flipboard, there are other similar news aggregators apps you could use like Feedly, SmartNews, Google News, etc.
Conclusion
These days, the best productivity tips for PR professionals and the best tools for PR productivity completely overlap. There are many available, with immediate benefits sitting ready for you to test them.
In one afternoon, implementing these 5 productivity tools alone could significantly increase your daily, weekly, and monthly output. On top of that, you’ll start finishing your workday on time. Get that social calendar ready!
