3 Easy Tips for Staying Organized Editorially in the Publishing World
With the amount of things going on in our daily lives, staying organized is a tough task. Projects can slip away, stories can be forgotten, people can be ignored… These are all things you definitely do not want to do when it comes to catering to your community. As a local publisher, it’s your responsibility to be the liaison between the community and everything else.
In light of that, we’ve put together three helpful tips to get you to stay on top of the game in the publishing world so your publication’s website can thrive in your neighborhood.
Label and Segment – When I first broke into this industry, my first boss made it a daily task to get my main email inbox down to 25 emails or less. Our inboxes, according to professional development expert Brendon Burchard, are simply convenient organizers of other people’s agendas. When you’re being pulled in hundreds of different directions, you have to figure out what is a priority and what can wait. Therefore, creating labels, or folders, in your inbox (Gmail or Outlook are the two most common nowadays) is key. The way to identify top-priority tasks is to keep them in your main inbox without labels. The rest can be tucked away for later. Just make sure you don’t forget to check in on them before it’s too late. Set a reminder for yourself (also accessible in programs like Outlook, or your smartphone) to check in on your labels about once a day, or at least every other day, of the workweek.
Create an Editorial Calendar – I like to gather all of my links and ideas in my notepad (sometimes handwritten, other times digitally), and then get them on a weekly editorial calendar ASAP. Again, taking action is the first step, or else even this task will get lost in the daily shuffle. Your calendar should be labeled in columns (day of the week) and rows (type of task). As head of the publisher concierge program, my clients’ publications go in the rows. So, as a publisher, if you oversee more than one publication, you can do that as well. If it’s just one publication you’re looking after, make your rows topics/categories and/or tasks. For example, your rows could be: Sports, Education, Local Government, Arts & Entertainment, Outdoors; or, similarly: Business Outreach, Calendar Events, Print Content, Social Media, Advertising/Sales.
Get Some Help – There are quite a few ways to get help at low costs, rather than hiring someone full time. You can use services like Upwork or go to Craigslist to hire a virtual assistant at a low hourly rate (remember, the output could suffer from this, though), or go out to the local universities to find an unpaid intern (where you would sign off on college credits). Even aspiring journalists from the local high school could work for you part-time if you have some small tasks you can’t fit into your schedule anymore. Recruit some bloggers to your site that produce quality content so you don’t have to do all the dirty work. And, of course, our publisher concierge program can take care of all things editorial at a much lower rate than hiring someone full-, or even part-time. Inquire about it here .
