Three things you can do today to get out of reactive mode

The feeling of never knowing what each day is going to look like can be an unsettling one.

While it’s exciting to work in a fast-paced and rapidly changing workplace, it soon becomes exhausting if it happens every day.

If you work in communications, there will always be elements of your job that can’t be planned for. Media issues will arise, opportunities you need to jump on, and little fires will need to be extinguished.

However, the idea that every day needs to be spent in reactive mode is just wrong. Here are three things you can do today to start working more strategically.

Set up an issues register

Figure out the issues that arise regularly or could become public for your organisation. If you set up a document that records all of these and the relevant messaging for each, you’re not starting from scratch when they eventuate.

It also means that if you’re not working on a particular day, your teammates don’t need to contact you for crucial information. 

Plan 6 weeks in advance

This might seem obvious, but many communications teams don’t plan their work in advance because they feel that they can’t.

Even if you are in a role that tends to be more issues-focused, planning as much proactive content as possible in advance will give you a solid foundation from which to work.

Talk to your manager

If you are finding that you’re spending a lot of your time in reactive mode, and it’s starting to get on top of you, I suggest talking to your manager about it.

I always recommend coming to your manager with suggestions for how it could be resolved (maybe the two ideas above!?) as a starting point for your conversation.