Are you productive or just busy?

This post nearly didn’t get written.

I’ve been so busy with a bunch of things this week—but I haven’t been very productive.

You know that great feeling you get when you have a lot to accomplish and you completed it all. You want to pat yourself on the back.

But when you’re just busy?

Oh my goodness. You end the day feeling like, “where did the time go? I didn’t get anything done.”

I can truthfully say, I’m still working on the time-management thing. I am the type of person who likes to focus on one project or one thing before jumping to something else. I can multitask, but it’s not my strong suit. And this, my friend, is why you need a plan.

Specifically, a communications plan.

During my communications career, I’ve worked with people who just threw caution to the wind and did whatever they felt like as a communications plan. I’ve also worked with people who wanted you to create a plan that was rigid and took half of the fiscal year to create—taking up valuable time to actually do the work.

Neither is a great strategy to actually get the things done that will help your organization reach its goals.

What to do? Make a communications plan.

But before you even consider creating a plan, review your business plan. What are your objectives? What do you want to accomplish? What is your leadership saying—what do they need and is that realistic? What is the communications team saying about best practices?

Once you review the business plan and talk to your people, you can start thinking about what communications strategies you need to put in place to help you meet those goals.

With a plan in place, you and your team can stop just being busy—running around creating communications that are overly time-consuming, rushed and badly put together—and use your time productively, creating communications that will help you get to the objectives that you set.

Beginning today, what strategies can you put in place to move from just being ‘busy’ to making your communications strategies more productive?

Share them with me—I’d love to hear!