Working within Internal Communications, I have deadlines every day for tomorrow’s key comms. Even though our company won’t fall over if I don’t publish a new ‘news’ story on our intranet, I pride myself in keeping our front page fresh through the working week.
I maintain a publishing schedule, a pipeline of urgent and upcoming stories, and so I’m constantly living in the future, mentally speaking.
I wonder if journalists feel like this. Their mother says, “gosh, look what happened with the MP expense scandal today” and the journalist offspring thinks “heck, I wrote that yesterday Mum”.
I talk to content authors about the date their article is scheduled for, but somehow the dates don’t seem ‘real’ to me until we’re actually into the relevant week. There’s so much going on each week, I don’t let myself think about next month for fear that I’ll get things confused. This means I have to have a solid schedule, and it’s crucial to me that I can trust my diary and schedule.
The file I keep my schedule in is open all day long, and I refer to it frequently through the day, and update it a couple of times due to the shifting priorities of our company.
Like, today is Thursday; I know that only because I’ve just had an important Friday deadline brought forward to today – so if tomorrow was Friday, today must be Thursday! But I didn’t wake knowing it was Thursday, I just got up in zombie mode and had my body get me on to the train and bus that make up my gods awful commute.
It doesn’t feel like a Thursday to me, I’m already worried about Monday’s main story (from an Exec Board member of course) and the manager’s cascade slides I’ve got to put together for tomorrow and Monday.
Time matters, comms must be timely, but I myself don’t care what ‘today’ is – today’s deadline is tomorrow’s news story, so for me, the weekend is the only ‘now’ I have.
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Photo credit: rh303 a.k.a. genitopower