Key insights:

• Inefficient, outdated workflows cost PR pros time, productivity and coverage. 

• Five major time traps often consume time and energy that could be spent on strategic work. 

• Top PR time wasters include approval delays, disorganized assets, Excel-based CRMs, manual reporting and fragmented tech stacks. 

• The solution lies in integrated, purpose-designed systems.

• Integrated PR platforms like PR.co can consolidate your media database, newsroom and reporting assets and automate repetitive tasks.

Monday starts with big plans on your to-do list: Craft a superb pitch. Give the three journalists you met at last week’s event a follow-up call. Finalize your Q1 strategy. 

Tuesday afternoon rolls around, and you’re about to throw your laptop out the window. You’ve chased approvals from three people who haven’t opened their inboxes in days, hunted for a missing logo file, and manually updated a coverage spreadsheet designed in the Dark Ages. 

No matter how solid your public relations skills are, it’s impossible to be an agile communicator when you drown in inefficient processes, disconnected PR tools and 5-minute tasks that eat entire afternoons. 

What are the most common public relations time traps? 

Modern digital PR involves a host of software tools designed to make your life easier. Unfortunately, however, some PR professionals still use outdated tools or software that add more complexities than they resolve.

Before upgrading to PR.co, for example, many of our customers use only the Office 365 suite (e.g., Excel for their lists, Word for content writing and reviews, and Outlook for email).

“While this usually works fine for small organizations with limited PR movements, it starts to show cracks as the organization grows,” says PR.co CEO, Jeroen Bos. Over time, these tools can lead to messy workflows, lost version control, confusion, frustration and wasted time.

Let’s take a look at five common time thieves and the PR efficiency hacks your team can implement right now to add more time to your day.

1. Other teams slow you down

The trap: There’s breaking news, and you need to update your social media accounts and website immediately. You submit an IT ticket, wait for dev availability, explain your request across multiple Slack channels, and hope your message goes live by next Tuesday.

Why it’s harmful: PR teams are always on, and timing is everything. If you rely on IT or external teams to make updates or sign off on approvals, it can slow you down when you need maximum PR efficiency. 

In a fast-moving news cycle, an out-of-date newsroom or behind-the-times press release also makes you look unprofessional or unresponsive. Plus, the growth of AI workflows means the public relations and media world now moves faster than ever before. You need to move at a pace that matches it.

The fix: Use an owned media platform your PR team can manage directly. Full control over an online newsroom or press page gives you autonomy over what you release and when you release it. You can update stories, publish releases and post new assets without delay.   

2. Scattered media assets 

The trap: A journalist is eager to run your story and just needs a few things: a high-res logo, executive headshots, some product images and the company boilerplate. 

But then you realize the logo is stuck in a Dropbox folder from 2022 (or maybe it’s on Google Drive?). The headshots were updated recently (or was it last year already?). Product images are scattered across three different locations, and not all have been approved. 

What should be a quick five-minute task with a single link ends up chewing up your entire morning.

Why it’s harmful: It simply doesn’t make sense to go on a scavenger hunt for every asset. Expired links, messy folders and scattered documents waste time and create friction for everyone. 

If a journalist has to ask for basic materials and then wait half a day to get them, that places unnecessary extra steps between their interest and your coverage. 

The fix: Invest in an online newsroom platform that hosts all your press kits, visuals and up-to-date info in one well-organized place. Next time a journalist asks, you can send them straight to your collection of high-res images, brand guidelines, press releases and fact sheets, without complicated logins or clunky link-sharing. 

A good newsroom also works for more than just journalists. Retail partners might need logos, event organizers may want bio pics, and influencers may need product shots. It makes sense to keep all these assets in one central hub you can easily update and share.

3. Using Excel as a PR CRM tool

The trap: Somewhere on your desktop is a spreadsheet named “Media_Contacts_2024_UPDATED_Final.xlsx.” It’s the foundation of your entire media relations strategy, and it used to be manageable. However, your growing contact list and industry knowledge have outpaced it. Great for your public relations career, not so much for your sanity.

You still have to manually update your spreadsheet whenever someone shifts to another publication. There’s a messy column called “Notes” with things like “Prefers Twitter DMs” and “Pitched in March (no response).” You now also wonder: Didn’t this person ask to be removed from your list six months ago? Or was that the other tech reporter at the same publication? 

Why it’s harmful: As your career and contact lists grow, manual updating becomes impossible. Change happens too fast, and the risk of mistakes is too high. Spreadsheets lead to mistakes, lost data, duplication and missed opportunities. 

Excel can silently judge you, but it can’t remind you to follow up, track your relationship history or keep sensitive contact information secure. 

The fix: Switch to a PR CRM system built for relationship management. A good CRM platform lets you track journalist relationships, log interactions, set reminders and segment by beat or outlet. For example, a PR CRM can show who on your team last spoke with a specific journalist or automatically flag follow-ups, saving you hours of guesswork every week.

4. Manually creating reports 

The trap: It’s month-end, which means it’s time for the dreaded ritual of reporting. You log into five different platforms (media monitoring, analytics, social listening and that other tool your colleague swears by) and start copy-pasting numbers.

It takes you the whole day to create a set of graphs and tables that management will look at for ten minutes. It comes with a strong dose of déjà vu and maybe some crying into your coffee: Didn’t you explain these same metrics last month? And the month before? 

Meanwhile, your real PR work is still waiting.

Why it’s harmful: Different stakeholders often want different things: the C-suite wants to see high-level impact, your manager wants campaign details, and the board wants quarterly trends. Without the right tools, you spend precious time and energy reformatting the same data three different ways.

You’re not alone. Many PR professionals find themselves spending more time reporting on their work than doing the high-level strategy work that makes those reports more impressive. 

The fix: Intuitive, AI-powered reporting platforms can now automate data collection and easily generate ready-to-download reports tailored to different audiences. The best PR productivity tools can also aggregate your coverage, calculate metrics and create easy-to-scan visual reports with just a few clicks.

Well-designed PR automation can take these repetitive tasks entirely off your plate and, most importantly, free you up for the work that really matters. 

5. Using a ton of tools that don’t talk to one another 

The trap: Your tech stack grew over time. You now have a media monitoring tool, a separate media database, your trusty Excel spreadsheet, Google Drive for assets, email for pitches, Canva for graphics for social media, Slack for internal comms, ClickUp for project management, and that one analytics platform you’re pretty sure nobody except you ever logs into. 

Every tool does one thing well, so why change things up? The problem is, the tools don’t talk to one another. You have 20 tabs open for every project, and your head spins. You’re constantly copy-pasting info, searching for the correct data, and reconciling conflicting information across sources. 

Why it’s harmful: Your PR efficiency suffers every time you switch between disconnected platforms. You lose focus, increasing your chances of introducing data inconsistencies. 

It’s hard to get a clear view of your performance, media contacts or PR/social media campaigns. Meanwhile, the cost of all your subscriptions is sky-high, while your workflows still feel disorganized and confusing. And let’s not even get started on how long it takes you to onboard new team members.

The fix: An integrated PR platform can bring your newsroom, CRM tools and reporting together in one place. This type of PR software lets your media contacts, coverage tracking and content management live together harmoniously and integrate seamlessly.

A properly integrated platform also lets you see the full picture of your PR efforts, work faster and smarter, and make team collaboration easier.

From time traps to real PR efficiency

Many of these PR time traps may feel unavoidable until you take steps to fix them.

Take a long, hard look at where your time actually goes and identify the blockages that could be solved with better systems. Then take a step back, assess your strategy, and identify what’s working and what could run more smoothly. Chances are, some of these time sinks quietly steal your productivity and make your work day harder than it needs to be.  

It can take a bit of work to free yourself from spreadsheet chaos, but once the job is done, it’ll be immediately clear how much time, energy and focus you’ve freed up. You’ll finally have the space to focus on the strategic, creative work that really matters. 

Ready to reclaim your time? Use PR.co to your advantage

PR.co combines PR publishing, distribution and analytics tools, so you can create a beautifully branded newsroom, share updates with journalists, and track results without jumping between multiple systems.

Imagine how much more you could get done if you could focus on a productive strategy instead of reactive firefighting? Schedule a demo to see how PR.co can help you escape these time traps for good. 

FAQs

1. How do PR automation tools handle data privacy? 

It’s crucial to protect your and your clients’ data. Ideally, all data sent to or from the platform should be encrypted in transit. Before you choose a platform, check for compliance and registration with relevant data authorities, as well as clear data processing agreements. 

2. What’s the role of APIs in automating PR workflows? 

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow your PR tools to communicate with each other. For example, an API can automatically pull media coverage from monitoring tools into your reports, or push newsroom updates to your analytics dashboard. In this way, the API reduces manual copy-pasting and keeps your data consistent across platforms.

3. Can PR automation handle crisis communications or time-sensitive updates? 

Absolutely. While human oversight is always needed, especially in a crisis, automated platforms give you one less thing to worry about when you need to move fast. 

Modern PR platforms like PR.co allow instant newsroom updates and real-time asset distribution. The key is to set up your crisis workflow in advance so that when a crisis hits, you can execute your plan (and not build the plane while you try to fly it). In a situation where speed really matters, manual processes are more likely to slow you down.