Perspective from Travis Small: When Benjamin Franklin, adapting a line from Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil, wrote “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” perhaps he should have considered adding deadlines into the mix. At least in the PR world, deadlines are the one certainty that we can always count on as a primary driver in our business. And, that is not always a bad thing.
When Benjamin Franklin, adapting a line from Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil, wrote “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” perhaps he should have considered adding deadlines into the mix. At least in the PR world, deadlines are the one certainty that we can always count on as a primary driver in our business. And, that is not always a bad thing.
This thought occurred to me as my wife and I dealt with our accountant this year in a frenzy of last-minute activity as we brushed up again the April 15th tax deadlines yet again. Every year we seem to run into this, and every year we promise that we’ll get ahead of it the next year. The funny thing is that if we were as organized and disciplined with pulling together our financial records throughout the year, as we were in the days leading up to the tax deadline, we certainly would not have this problem.
Moving on from the tax theme and my collective trauma associated with April 15th, it does bring me back to the constant deadlines that we encounter as PR professionals as part of our day-to-day work. We are always dealing with reporters that are on deadline, we have numerous client-related deadlines that we need to meet, and then we have our internal deadlines that can range from entering our hours to ensuring that our company blog submissions are complete on time (alas, another one where I’m guilty of some last-minute work).
As someone who likes to think of himself as pretty well organized, I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m a perpetual procrastinator, but there is something about working in the PR business for some time that causes your brain to produce its best results when operating under a deadline. Looking back at some of the best written press releases, pitches or contributed articles over my career, most often they have been produced to meet a pending deadline.
However, in a deadline-intensive business such as PR, it is important that we don’t lose sight of the big picture for our clients. As we move from project to project, it is always important to make sure that the work we are doing does tie back to the larger strategy for our clients. In addition, as we work to get out client press releases and pitches, we need to pay attention to the larger trends and national stories to ensure that our news can stand out or perhaps be part of that conversation.
All of that said when looking toward next year’s tax season and my next blog contribution, I’m committed to ensuring for more time before the deadline to pull things together – that is unless another pressing deadline gets in the way .