Morgan McLintic on PR

Timesheets - bane or boon?

No-one particularly likes filling in timesheets - why would you? But whatever their model, fundamentally agencies are selling the time of their teams. They may package it in different ways commercially but being consultancies, time is the asset they have to sell. So it makes sense to monitor how that time is spent. Clients want to know they are getting the correct amount of time for the budget they allocate, and agencies want to know they are delivering that time, and not more (certainly not less). Invariably clients get a bit more time but the excess mustn't be chronic or acute.

Equally PR staffers must be able to track their time for their own efficiency. If you work across several clients, as most agency staff will, you need to balance your allocation. There's always a gravitational pull towards a favorite client, or the one you're most comfortable with, the newest or the noisiest. Timesheets help to address that, particularly if they are transparent to the entire office.

Another benefit is that the humble timesheet, although it's an additional admin chore, does prevent over-work. It's clear who is burning the midnight oil and who has some spare capacity. Some staff, particularly juniors, tend to over-work for the wrong reasons. Perhaps they feel they need to, or perhaps they're still mastering the skills of time management. Here again the timesheets can step in since it'll be clear whether excess hours are due to over-commitment or inefficiency. We know what we've committed to so where are these extra hours coming from?

Once you've mastered the use of timesheets, it can transform the way you work. You know the time you have available and the tasks to be delivered each week. Then you can set yourself internal deadlines against each activity, or you can rapidly decide that you're over-committed. This helps in managing expectations and priorities. It also makes you value your own time, and be disciplined with it.

When I was a junior account exec, I gave freely of my time since I wanted to build experience. You do need to get some miles on the clock after all. But long-term, pumping in long days is not sustainable nor really that productive. Each of us will find their own tolerances, and it's true that like any muscle, your brain can sustain higher levels of performance the more you exercise it, but there are limits. Some of us are work sprinters who put in long hours then take a break, others are marathon runners who are capable of sustained periods of effort. Whatever your personal style, the timesheet should be your friend. It helps you monitor the greatest and most fleeting asset you have - your time.

Blog stress

Just wanted to reassure all those of you who have read today's New York Times piece, that my prolific blogging is in no way impacting my health. Running a PR firm's a killer though.

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Ten ways to reduce stress

PR is inherently stressful. It's highly task- and deadline-oriented, fast-paced, collaborative and rapidly-evolving. Any situation where a group of people need to cooperate with several other groups around detailed information within tight deadlines is a good recipe for stress.

Here are a few ways for PR professionals to reduce the stress levels:

1. Get organized - Stress normally peaks when you feel out of control. Take 10 minutes to write down all your actions and prioritize them. Which really need to get done today? You'll feel much less stressed once you can see the magnitude of the task ahead. Write down time allocations next to each if that helps.

2. Tidy up - A tidy desk will help you feel more in control. If papers are flying everywhere, and empty coffee cups encroach on your workspace, you'll subconsciously feel more tense and those items will distract you. Yes, you may know where everything is, and sure, you may feel you work better that way - but you're only kidding yourself really. Same goes from your computer desktop.

3. Get fit - I'm serious. Healthy mind, healthy body is absolutely true. If you are unfit, you are less able to cope with stress and the demands of the job. Plus, getting fitter will help you focus, be more productive and attack the root cause of stress.

4. Drink less - Stimulants, like your morning java, and depressants, like that ice cold beer or glass of wine, are like stepping on the gas and then the brakes for your body. They can contribute to stress over the long term, even though short term they give a boost. In fact, it's best to drink water - probably more than you think you need.

5. Share - Are you the burning martyr who turns the lights on, then off at the end of the day? Could be a sign you need to trust others, and share the load. Sure, your team members might not do it in the same way as you would yourself, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Stress and an inability to delegate are strongly connected.

6. Say no - Try it. Just say no to a few minor requests. Even from clients. It takes practice but not accepting a task when you have more important ones to deliver is perfectly legitimate. Much better than accepting it, and having it rot at the bottom of your to dos. If you explain why you are declining, we'll understand.

7. Say yes - Accept help when it's offered. I'm staggered at how few people accept a helping hand when offered and then stay until 9.00pm slaving on a task for the next day. People don't offer if they don't mean it. Together you'll get through it much faster.

8. Get out - Put your pen down, step away from the computer and just walk around the block. That big yellow thing in the sky will make you feel much better. You'll probably work better when you get back, or sit down with the answer to the vexing question if you get some perspective and fresh air.

9. Get in - Arrive early at work. Before clients, reporters and colleagues. These vital moments can be used to plan your day and do the real mental weightlifting. They can often be the most creative and productive of the day. Then leave promptly at the end of the day.

10. Get off - Close email, IM, Twitter, turn off your Blackberry or cell and put the landline on DND. These are tools to do the job, but they are also distractions and a source of incoming requests. What you need at present is to get across the current ones. Don't drop off the grid entirely, just limit your availability until you hit the deadline. If you have an office or cube, shut the door. If not, then book a room for 30 minutes and work from there. People will respect your space - we've all been there.

It's worth noting that not all stress is bad. No stress at all, can be unproductive too. People work best when under a bit of pressure - but too much can be debilitating. Hopefully these techniques will help you manage your stress levels a bit better. One final thing - smile. There's nothing like laughter and a few gags to reduce the tension.

The fiction of work/life balance

I'm not sure who first coined the phrase 'work/life balance' but it's an unhelpful misnomer. Work is an integral part of your life. If you don't see your work that way, you should find a role or profession which you are passionate about and which engages you. Until working becomes a manifestation and expression of who you are, you'll be unfulfilled. Extra vacation, shorter hours, flexitime etc all pale beside the importance of that imperative.

Those looking for 'work/life' balance are often looking for the wrong thing or something which doesn't exist. What they claim to want is a nicely confined role which is satisfying while they are there, and which they can switch off at the stroke of 5.30pm when they go home to get on with their lives. Sorry but if predictable hours are what you want, don't work in PR. The news never sleeps, and so crises can break at any time. Get comfortable with work encroaching on your personal time and vice versa.

Nothing worth having comes easily. Success in PR often means hard work and long hours. If you enjoy what you are doing, this isn't a problem. People who do any activity over a prolonged period, naturally get better at it. So to progress, you need to pump in the hours and improve. Experience isn't necessarily a function of age, but hours at the coal face. There are no short cuts, I'm afraid.

We all have conflicting priorities in our lives. Rather than see them through a paradigm of 'work' or 'life', I prefer to see them as either mental, emotional, physical or spiritual. You need to balance each of those four elements of your life through the activities you do. Your professional career can easily encompass all four, even the spiritual. Spending time with family, going to the gym, seeing friends, meditating, even listening to your iPod all hit different aspects of those needs. Imbalance or even ignoring one of them is what can lead to a nebulous sense of dissatisfaction. It's easy to conclude it's a 'work/life balance' issue when in fact it's something deeper.

Recognize too that no balance or equilibrium is static. Achieving a balance is a process, not a one time event. There will be times when work, family, church, friends etc become demanding and require attention. This is fine and natural. Chronically focusing on just one group, and hence just the one set of mental, physical, emotional and spiritual demands/rewards they bring creates imbalance.

So if your New Year's resolution is to get more 'work/life' balance, look at it through a different lens. Is your work truly satisfying? If so, how can you weave in other elements which you're not getting? That might be as simple as riding a bike to work to get more exercise, or it might be setting up a volunteer club after work to ramp the emotional payback. Blending the needs and rewards is what leads to balance.

Of course, consistently putting it into practice is another matter. And that's one we all face. Here's to health, wealth and happiness in 2008!

UPDATE - Cali and Jody kindly dropped me a note about their upcoming book 'Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It' and their blog which gives some excellent advice about work/life balance, together with their analysis of recent articles on the topic. Thanks - looking forward to reading it.

How to manage email

Email has increasingly become the workhorse technology of PR. It makes a good servant but a poor master. Once you start to get above a certain level, which for me is about 200-250, productivity suffers. Most business books advise you to restrict email usage to two or three times per day. For PR consultants that's not practical. Speed of response to reporters and clients mean the delay of several hours between email checks is unacceptable. In fact, most PR people I know can barely last an hour.

Under these circumstances, it's easy to get email urgency addiction and spend the entire day responding to nothing but email. Urgency does not dictate importance, but most of us can't delineate when triaging our email inboxes. Everything gets equal weight.

There are five things you should do with each email - Delete (preferable), Delegate (if poss), Deal with (if it's a 60 second task), Schedule (if it's going to take longer) or Store (if it's just fyi). The main thing to resist is reading all your email and then circling back to the first one again to action it. Inevitably this leads to a sense of lack of control as more email floods in. Plus double-handling each email burns cycles.

You should also try to receive as little email as possible. You need to be proactive to achieve this. It's common in PR to have email aliases for each client which go to the entire team. Normally, there is correspondence back and forth on these channels which are only intend for a few recipients. Either get off this group or set up rules which automatically file them for consumption later. Most of it will be just for info.

Religiously unsubscribe from newsletters which are irrelevant and use spamblockers and white lists to reduce noise. As a PR person, it's your job to be easy to contact. This means you end up on all kinds of lists. Get back off them if you can. CAN-SPAM has made this much easier for legitimate companies in the US.

I've experimented with several methods of filing email - right down to by client and by activity eg Client/Media or Client/Analyst relations. This looks great but does take time. I estimate 95% of email over a week old, you'll never look at again. Search technology (Google Desktop or Spotlight for Mac) has improved to the extent that you can now probably find an old mail if you know some basic details. I now let email pile up (I'm a Piler not a Filer). The advantage of this is that it requires no time and provides a chronological method to find old emails.

The disadvantage is that your inbox can become swiftly overloaded. Much over 10,000 and quite apart from the daunting nature, technically it starts to slow down. If you get 300 mails a day, it only takes a month to get to this stage. My new technique is to dump all the emails in my inbox into an archive folder at the end of every day. I note down all the actions, and just move them across to a file imaginatively called Old Inbox (now on Old Inbox 14!). Then each day you come in to a clear inbox and can immediately see what needs dealing with. It's easy to find recent mails since they're all in one place, and minimal time is wasted filing or sorting.

This system may be basic but it does work (at least for me). Do let me know if you have better ideas. Just drop me an email...or better still give be a call.

UPDATE - Lars Schou has emailed to point out an excellent series of posts on 43 Folders called Inbox Zero, which I highly recommend for the email afflicted.

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PR and paranoia

Most good PR people are paranoid. Admit it. You are. This is because it pays to think through what might go wrong. For instance, how might this story be interpreted? What potential crises are looming? What happens if the laptop fails in the presentation? What if there's traffic on the press tour?

The mantra is plan for the worst and hope for the best. It's a recipe for long hours and sleepless nights. Get used to it or get out quick.

Personally, I'm fine with scenario planning and asking the awkward questions you're not supposed to ask. But there comes a point where healthy paranoia becomes, well unhealthy. There are plenty of things to worry about in PR. We're paid to do that so clients don't have to - it's called responsibility. But there is a point at which it becomes destructive and you end up chasing phantoms.

Getting the right level of paranoia is hard. Too much and you end up burning cycles and midnight oil on increasingly unlikely events. The trouble is - it's a vicious circle. The one time things go off course becomes a justification for a mountain of purposeless planning.

Paranoia yields decreasing marginal returns. Knowing when to stop can make the difference between a sustainable work rate (and mental state) and burn out. In general, the management of paranoia is a function of experience. Newbies tend to lack sufficient paranoia until they make a mistake and pay the consequences - you don't do it twice. Veterans have seen the cycle a few times and know enough to handle issues if they crop up. I find the crunch point is in between - the account management level - when you know the consequences but lack the flight time to put the risks in perspective. Here be demons.

Sad to say though, the demons are personal. No-one can make you not worry, however much rationalizing they may do. And, heck I'll recruit people who care enough about these details every day over the blase Devil may care types. But recognize the trait and learn to harness and manage it. Healthy paranoia is a good thing, but it has to be just that, healthy.

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween from the LEWIS team.

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The Technical Transition

Just a quick pointer to an article I wrote for the International Public Relations Association about the increasingly technical nature of public relations. It seems to me that increasingly your ability to execute as a PR professional is a function of your technical ability. I'm citing the rise of social media, SEO, online video, podcasting and even virtual worlds as examples of that transition. You can read it in full here.

I'm indebted to Robert Gray, editor of FrontLine, the IPRA's magazine, for his kind offer to submit. Let me know if you agree or disagree about this trend.

Technorati Tags: online video, podcast, SEO, social media, virtual worlds

PR agencies must grow or die

That's right, PR firms need to grow or they fail. Their demise may be slow but it's relentless and inevitable.

Let me explain. Good PR firms hire ambitious talent; people who want fast-track (and even international) careers. They want to work on broader and more complex campaigns, they want to manage teams, to take more responsibility. Heck, some even want salary increases along the way.

The best people want progression. And you can't keep the best people unless you deliver just that. And that means just one thing - growth. All the best firms are outward-looking and focused on expansion. As soon as that stops, staff turn inwards, careers reach ceilings and a gradual politicization begins. A PR firm which is not growing is one which will surely fail. It'll lose the best new talent to expansion-oriented firms which can give them solid career paths, and the ones who remain are those without drive. The best clients soon pick up on the mediocrity and leave as well. Then you have mediocre staff working on average accounts.

I've met several agency heads who only want to grow their businesses to a certain size. Something which is 'manageable'. Now that's fine as far as it goes, but it comes at a price. And that price is the loss of top talent. The number two moves to set up their own shop, the hot wunderkind gets poached. There is no such thing as status quo within PR firms. Anyone who has lost their promising second in command will know how painful that is. Back down the snake you go.

The drive for growth comes at a price too of course. It's hard to balance resources with the client roster profitably. Periodically, there are times when things get out of sync. It's how quickly you respond which defines success. Too many clients and too few staff leads to burn out, and the loss of both staff and their clients. Too many staff without enough work eats profits and creates internal issues as people tread on each other's toes.

Agency heads must win. Again and again. And not just win revenues, but win the right revenues. Backing the best clients who will execute on their plans. It's not much fun doing the PR for the sixth in a market, it's got to be the leader or the challenger. Growth based on the wrong clients won't be consistent.

If you're not an agency head, so what? What does this mean to you? Well, maybe it makes all the difference. It means you need to find out whether the agency you are planning to join or that perhaps you work with at the moment is growing consistently. Because if not, the only opps which will come your way will be from staff attrition above you. And those people will be going because they see something perhaps you don't. If tomorrow looks like today, that's a problem.

Of course, all firms have good and bad years. Agency fortunes swing sometimes on the most narrow of decisions (we've all been second in the pitch right?). But it's the trend you need to look at. And the trend relative to the competition which is more important. Not all firms bombed in the downturn and not all firms are managing to grow in these warmer climes. It's important that you've tied your career to a locomotive not a lamp post.

So for agency heads and their staff alike, that's why the mantra is grow or die.

Nick Leonard is blogging

Nick Leonard, MD of OCTANE, is blogging. In fact he has been for about a month, so this post is overdue. Nick is one of the best and funniest creative writers I know. So what's his blog like? I'll leave you to find out...

Disclosure - I'm not sure whether this is really necessary, but just in case, OCTANE is a division of my firm, LEWIS. I've known Nick for about eleven years as a result. He's now heading OCTANE and has already opened in France and Germany and moved into swanky new offices in Victoria, London. Impressive stuff imho.

Technorati Tags: OCTANE PR, Nick Leonard