Morgan McLintic on PR

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.

Technorati Tags: blogging, NYT, stress

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.

Technorati Tags: email

That whole podcasting thing

I'm trying it. Kinda.

Here's the pilot. (Thanks Ian for doing this on the spur of the moment). Am sure it can be made better. I joked on 360 that it was sponsored by the word 'perfect' which i seemed to use six times in three minutes. Learning by doing and hopefully I'll get a bit faster.

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Morganutiae

You can now find all my updates to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Del.icio.us and PodBean on my Tumblelog - Morganutiae. If you're unfamiliar with Tumblr it takes feeds from a number of social media sites and general RSS feeds and aggregates them in a lightweight, sparsely formatted blog.

I've called mine Morganutiae because there's probably more detail there than anyone might need but it was quick to set up and I really like Tumblr's clean interface. It's interesting to see the aggregated digital output for each day. Sometimes it's just the odd tweet or FB update. Others, like today, there's video, blog posts, tweets and even a very short podcast. For those with enough time on their hands, the feed is here. Those who are yet to set up their own blog and who don't need much customization might consider Tumblr as their platform.

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Channel hopping

We got a glimpse of how television could be last night. Detective series, CSI: NY broadcast an edition where the criminal was tracked in 3D virtual world, Second Life. About 30% of the program was shot in machinima by The Electric Sheep Company (another client). But the crime hasn't been solved. It continues in Second Life where viewers can now become crime scene investigators themselves. The characters we saw in the program are identical to the ones in the virtual world - down to the pixel, since they were used to shoot the program. It's a great way of extending the CSI experience.

What amazed me though was the level of interaction while the program aired. Of course, we were in-world, trying out Electric Sheep's new OnRez Viewer (which is very slick - love the back button), chatting and IMing with each other. At the same time, the email was flying and AIM popping. There was also a discussion in real time on Twitter and several friends' Facebook statuses declaring they were glued too.

Television isn't normally a communal experience. Too many channels and TIVO mean there's rarely a synchronized time we all watch the same thing (in fact usually only sports). More importantly, there's no channel to interact through. Last night's CSI reversed that in many ways. There were too many channels of communication, but only one thing to watch.

Fans of The Office (US edition) will be pleased to see Second Life appears in that tonight too.

Technorati Tags: CSI: NY, machinima, OnRez, Second Life, The Electric Sheep Company

PRSA T3 Conference in NYC

I'm moderating a panel about PR and virtual worlds this afternoon in New York at the PRSA's T3 Conference. I'll be joined by Giff Constable, general manager of The Electric Sheep Company and Adam Pasick, bureau chief of Reuters' SL office. Looking forward to hearing their insights and to some great discussion with the audience. Giff also has a good 'Intro to Second Life' video we'll be showing, technology permitting.

Technorati Tags: PRSA, Second Life

Will Facebook replace [Insert social media tool here]?

I've just joined Facebook. I like it. I've made all the same friends that I have on other social networking sites like Ning and tools like Twitter. But there's a big difference - Facebook has broader penetration, beyond the technorati (with a small t). Certainly in terms of monthly traffic it outshines most social media tools. Now that Facebook is allowing all-comers, I'm wondering how it will impact the use of those other services.

For example, how does the Status Update differ from Twitter? It allows more characters, it has a historical page of prior updates, you can see the updates of your friends and it's mobile. It also doesn't suffer from the asynchronous nature of Twitter where you can follow someone but they don't follow you, so can't hear your counterpoints. If you are friends on Facebook, the conversation is bi-directional.

The granularity of information you can share on Facebook is also frightening. Quite apart from political views and relationship details which it prompts you to answer, you can also detail your full education and your work experience. There are groups galore for each institution, organization, employer, club, association or interest. Since people join for personal reasons, adoption levels are going to be much higher than for professional social networks, such as LinkedIn. Already, in just a few days, my Facebook invites are outstripping my LinkedIn connection requests. Both have the ability to upload your email contacts to find them on Facebook. At the moment, I have more LinkedIn penetration among my contacts, but I'm sure that will change. Will we be keeping track of our professional and social contacts on Facebook?

I'm sure I'll find more applications. The Send Message function (like Twitter's Direct Message) also looks like a good web email client, again without the character restrictions and with the ability to add attachments.

Experienced Facebookers may of course know all this, and have probably discovered many more applications which I'm yet to encounter. Let me know what else I'm missing.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn

Back

Back in the US after a great trip to the UK. One thing which struck me is that the UK has gone 'carbon footprint' crazy. Companies are all falling over themselves to promote that they are carbon neutral, editorial is jam-packed with features about reducing your personal carbon footprint, articles about geothermal heating, how to survive without a car etc. If you want coverage, think about how to link what you are doing to that megatrend. But it needs to be done carefully since there will be a backlash against firms which just pay lipservice to being greener. Phrase of the day came from Clive Booth, who termed this 'greenwashing', which i love.

Traveling in today i notice Microsoft's Office 2007 ads. Boy do they need a new ad firm. The Vista ones about a 'jolt to the operating system' were dire (didn't even tell you what was new or why - just the logo in an Aero bubble and that odd strap). The Office 2007 ones picture a guy on the way to work: 'Day one - the next 8 hours will be very, very different.' You bet they will since all the menus will be different and you'll spend a whole bunch of extra time learning how to do what you could easily do yesterday. I know companies often advertise their insecurities (Shell being green for example) but this seems like an odd angle to choose.

This was my first trip to the UK with my son, Jake. Traveling with an infant puts a new perspective on traveling woes. My friend Ezra Roizen summed it up well in an email to me - “11 hours on a plane with a baby is one of those special experiences that everyone should enjoy at least once before they die - which will probably be all the sooner because of it.” To his credit, Jake was brilliant but I now sympathize with the poor souls in the bulkhead seats.