Time and Motion: making every day count

by Alicia Patterson

The best laid plans, the most insightful definition of your PR ‘problem’ and the most measurable objectives will fall into an embarrassing and useless heap if you don’t plan your timing for your campaign or project.

Time, to paraphrase a cliché, is of the essence. It is simply not physically possible to achieve everything you want to in a PR plan if you do not carefully map out your timeframe and plan your activity accordingly.

If you work in a consultancy environment, this is particularly important because you will have a range of clients and projects with different deadlines and all your clients will apparently suffer under the mistaken delusion that you only ever work (or think) about their project or campaign alone.

In order to plan your time, you need to do your homework on how long it will take for you to complete any particular task or element of your strategy. This sounds incredibly simple, but it is one of the most underemphasised aspects of public relations practice and the cause of most stress and burnout.

Consider this. You are working on a project that ultimately involves the printing of a brochure followed by a direct mail-out to all careers co-ordinators or teachers in every school nationally. This distribution must occur in time for teachers to get the information and pass it on to students before they make choices about which subjects they select in the final years of the secondary schooling. These subject choices will ultimately direct the direction of every student’s educational or working career. This subject selection occurs in August every year.

In terms of time, you must count back from the crucial August deadline, knowing that there is a point in the year where if the information is not disseminated, it will be too late and your client will have a bill from you and possibly not have achieved their objective.

The thinking might go something like this:

• subject selection for students happens in August
• careers counsellors / teachers begin counselling students about choices in mid-June, therefore
• careers counsellors / teachers need the brochure information at the start of June -- at the latest.

This gives you an estimated direct mailing date, whereby everything must be in the post as of 31 May.

What do you need to have done by that date? Well, try:

• Write draft text for brochure (2 days)
• Allow time for client to review text and provide amendments (4 days)
• Amend text (half a day)
• Manage the development of the design concept and layout of the brochure; decide format for brochure (1 week)
• Allow time for client to provide feedback and sign off for design concept and format (4 days)
• Get print quotes for brochure (1 day)
• Get quotes on mailing costs and mailhouse collation costs (inserting brochure with letter into envelopes) (1 hour)
• Gather data for mail lists, check data and get labels ready for mail house (between 1 and 5 days depending on access)
• Final text and design time, proof to client (1 week)
• Client sign-off and any final amendments (2 days)
• Files to printer for film to be created, film to be checked for errors (2 days)
• Print run -- allow one week turnaround before delivery to mail house (1 week)
• Allows a few days for collation and mailing (2 days)
• Allow between one and seven days for mail to reach all careers counsellors / teachers (1 week)

Now this is a very basic project. But counting back on those tasks means that you must start work on the first task about 40 working days before 31 May. You have to start work at the beginning of April.

Now, naturally, this process could be much quicker, depending on your circumstances, or much longer depending on how many obstacles you encounter. But if that’s what it takes to get that simple task done, you can clearly see why a larger campaign with many moving parts needs very careful planning.

What if, for example, the brochure distribution was to coincide with a broader strategy which included paid radio advertisement, an Internet site and professional development for teachers about the information your client is offering nationally?

Then, you may need to add another component to your time-planning. You need to chart when activity will be happening so you can plan when things can (or should) coincide. Do you want the radio activity to happen during all of July, before students make their choices, or do you want to concentrate radio activity only in the fortnight before their selections must be lodged? Do you want it to coincide with when the teachers receive their mailout? How long do you want the website to be online? When do you want this to happen -- at the same time as the radio ads or at a different time? You’ll need the professional development to be happening well before the brochure is sent, so does it have to be completed before July? Do you want this overlap?

Everyone finds their own technique for managing their time and the imperatives of a project or campaign. Whatever works for you is best but essentially you want to be able to apply some logic to your time-planning and to be able to clearly document your timelines and activities against the timeline. You need to do this so you can clearly see the impact of a holdup in one section of the process. You will be able to make a decision about which tasks can be hurried along and which ones cannot -- you may be able to write the text brochure faster and get the client to sign off faster, but you cannot make print presses print faster or the postal system deliver faster.

Some people use a simple list in text format that lists deadlines and what needs to be done in chronological order -- then they tick things off as they happen.

Some people find it more useful to create a calendar, mapping tasks along the way to provide a more visual cue. Others use charts, blocking in time against weeks and cross-referencing them with activity.

From this kind of a charting exercise, you can see very quickly and clearly when you are going to be busiest -- and how the strategy fits together over a period of time. It gives you a chance to plan your staff and resources. You will probably need smaller, more detailed charts or timeframe plans for each component of the project or campaign so you can stay in charge of what is going on -- and make clear to those around you why it is important for certain things to be completed at certain times.

You can also clearly see from this chart that your work will be over when the campaign is apparently at its most active -- June to August. By this time, you will be well into your next project and this one will be a distant memory.

In creating your time plan, however you decide to do it, it pays to include the staff who will be working with you. If you are working for a client, then it will pay to make sure they understand the rationale behind your planning and how you have planned your time. Including these people will help you to make an accurate plan. It might take you one day to write the brochure text, but if you have to hand that to a more junior or less informed colleague, they may need much more time.

Remember also that while some people find the laying-out of these kinds of plans tedious and unnecessary, the process will certainly put you in control and help you feel confident about meeting the challenge ahead of you. Spending a few hours planning a timeframe for your project will be an investment in your efficiency, your professionalism and your sanity.

And one final hint: With clever plans (like clever strategies), expect the unexpected. Build into your time planning time for things to completely foul up -- and plan ahead. If you plan properly and realistically, the biggest of foul-ups can be salvaged and won’t mean disaster for an entire project.

Your time starts... now. Good luck.

-- AP
©1999 Alicia Patterson