Jacob Streiter is Vice President at Rosen Group, a full-service public relations agency headquartered in New York Metropolis.
that process you have 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 with the intention to get the vital issues performed — and do them nicely — there are particular sorts of duties that simply have to be put to the wayside.
President Dwight Eisenhower famously stated, “What’s vital is seldom pressing and what’s pressing is seldom vital.” And that line of pondering finally turned the premise for the Eisenhower Matrix, a time administration instrument 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.
If you happen to deal with each incoming process as “pressing,” good luck discovering the time and focus to:
- Write that tailor-made and pithy pitch that secures a New York Occasions profile piece.
- Assemble that media record appropriately custom-made to your shopper’s wants.
- Draft that byline that successfully addresses a fancy and nuanced subject.
- Brainstorm your shopper’s subsequent huge concept that generates a wave of headlines.
- Domesticate collaborative and impactful relationships along with your co-workers.
On the finish of the day, the above actions are what result in transferring the shopper’s needle — they usually get performed solely if you struggle to make the time, focus and power for them. With wholesome, strategic doses of laziness and procrastination, you’ll be able to go a good distance in guaranteeing that your invaluable assets are allotted properly.
What does strategic laziness seem like? Listed here are a couple of examples:
- Utilizing instruments that unencumber your time and lighten your psychological load, like ChatGPT to get the ball rolling on concept 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 potential, with messaging that’s topline, easy and concise.
And listed below are examples of strategic procrastination:
- Dealing with calendar invitations, transactional emails and different administrative duties in batches, throughout pre-scheduled time blocks, quite than reactively and haphazardly as they arrive in.
- Tabling vital however not time-sensitive initiatives, like drafting a press launch or finalizing logistical particulars for a phase, till nearer to (however nonetheless fairly prematurely of) the deadline.
The takeaway I suggest: be lazy when which means you may get equal or higher outcomes by doing much less work, and procrastinate when laying aside a selected process or challenge permits you to concentrate on the high-impact work that’s most instantly vital.
Creating the flexibility to distinguish between the high-impact work and the “you’re solely doing it as a result of you must” work — and taking a unique method to every of these classes — is the way you degree up on this trade from busy to productive.
Now, after all, because of the nature of PR, there’ll inevitably be events when you must shift gears shortly for a short-notice challenge or decide up the tempo to satisfy an ultra-tight deadline. However, usually, these cases needs to be the exception quite than the rule. And going a step additional, I’d make the case that the fast-moving, dynamic nature of the trade 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’ve gotten it. Now you’re in on the key to your subsequent promotion: be lazy, and procrastinate.
