Jacob Streiter is Vice President at Rosen Group, a full-service public relations agency headquartered in New York Metropolis.
You already know that activity you had been simply requested to tackle? Put it off! Yup, that’s proper. You’ve got my permission.
Frankly, there’s simply an excessive amount of “ASAP” going round on this enterprise, and so as to get the necessary issues accomplished — and do them nicely — there are particular sorts of duties that simply should be put to the wayside.
President Dwight Eisenhower famously stated, “What’s necessary is seldom pressing and what’s pressing is seldom necessary.” And that line of pondering ultimately turned the idea for the Eisenhower Matrix, a time administration software that appears like this:
If there was a magical technique to visualize every PR skilled’s to-do record plotted on the Eisenhower Matrix, my wager is we’d observe that almost all of us — to the detriment of our work, our purchasers and our psychological well being — find yourself overstuffing that higher left quadrant whereas underutilizing the three others.
Should you deal with each incoming activity as “pressing,” good luck discovering the time and focus to:
- Write that tailor-made and pithy pitch that secures a New York Instances profile piece.
- Assemble that media record appropriately personalized to your shopper’s wants.
- Draft that byline that successfully addresses a fancy and nuanced subject.
- Brainstorm your shopper’s subsequent large concept that generates a wave of headlines.
- Domesticate collaborative and impactful relationships together with your co-workers.
On the finish of the day, the above actions are what result in shifting the shopper’s needle — and so they get accomplished solely whenever you combat to make the time, focus and power for them. With wholesome, strategic doses of laziness and procrastination, you may go a good distance in making certain that your invaluable sources are allotted properly.
What does strategic laziness appear to be? Listed here are just a few examples:
- Utilizing instruments that unlock your time and lighten your psychological load, like ChatGPT to get the ball rolling on thought brainstorming and OtterAI for automated speech-to-text note-taking.
- Limiting your media consumption to only two or three check-ins unfold all through the day.
- Making your pitches as quick as doable, with messaging that’s topline, easy and concise.
And listed here are examples of strategic procrastination:
- Dealing with calendar invitations, transactional emails and different administrative duties in batches, throughout pre-scheduled time blocks, slightly than reactively and haphazardly as they arrive in.
- Tabling necessary however not time-sensitive tasks, like drafting a press launch or finalizing logistical particulars for a phase, till nearer to (however nonetheless moderately prematurely of) the deadline.
The takeaway I suggest: be lazy when meaning you may get equal or higher outcomes by doing much less work, and procrastinate when pushing aside a specific activity or mission lets you give attention to the high-impact work that’s most instantly necessary.
Creating the power to distinguish between the high-impact work and the “you’re solely doing it as a result of it’s important to” work — and taking a unique method to every of these classes — is the way you degree up on this business from busy to productive.
Now, in fact, because of the nature of PR, there’ll inevitably be events when it’s important to shift gears rapidly for a short-notice mission or choose up the tempo to satisfy an ultra-tight deadline. However, normally, these cases ought to be the exception slightly than the rule. And going a step additional, I’d make the case that the fast-moving, dynamic nature of the business all of the extra underscores the significance of getting a principled, discerning method to the day’s work.
As creator Greg McKeown wrote in his e-book Essentialism: “However extra effort doesn’t essentially yield extra outcomes. ‘Much less however higher’ does.”
So, there you have got it. Now you’re in on the key to your subsequent promotion: be lazy, and procrastinate.
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