How to Protect Your Workflow in Crisis Mode

A communications director’s strategies for surviving constant crisis at her college.

I’ve come to the unpleasant realization recently that higher education communications work has stopped following the rules of higher education communications work. 

For me, communications work at a college used to be a fairly well-balanced mix of “regular work, regular work, small emergency, regular work.” In other words, it’s all newsletters and website edits until the freshman dorm has a fire alarm that just won’t turn off. 

But since February 2020...we’ve been in emergency mode all the time. The fire alarm has been going off for years now. And it Just. Won’t. Stop.  

Two Bad Options

The problem is, underneath the constant stream of campus and PR crises, the regular work of a communications office has to keep going. How do you do that without a) completely sacrificing your precious work-life balance, or b) sending your boss that resignation letter you’ve been composing in your spare moments which features liberal, cathartic usage of these emojis: 😡 🤬 💩? 

I fell prey to option “a” in the beginning. To save myself, I developed one simple rule for sanity: overtime is for emergencies only. Of course I help out when a notification about a new positive student case comes in after 5:00 pm. But I don’t do any other work, like finish that pesky web update that a faculty member has been asking for, just because I happen to be checking my email at 6:32 pm. Boundaries are hard to come by these days, so you’ve got to maintain them when and where you can. 

Saying “No” to Overload

As for the other tasks that used to occupy your whole day? Yes, do you remember those carefree times when you could take a week to brainstorm new taglines or do a deep-dive on analytics? Yeah. Those were the days. 

My strategy has been to break down the work in my inbox into the “essential tasks” and the “not-quite-so-essential” tasks. It’s helped to be clear with my teammates, supervisor, and coworkers that I’m in triage mode until the pandemic stops taking up so much of my day. I’ve had really good results when I use phrases and frameworks like “I can commit to X, but Y will have to wait until Z.”

And, as a bonus—it can also be a great moment to move away from tasks that don’t quite fit into your portfolio (but somehow you ended up with them anyways—funny how that seems to happen!) This can be a great moment to restructure your work around what must be done, and what can be done if time allows, and let the people with higher salaries figure out the rest. 

What have been your most helpful tactics for making it through? Let me know in the comments!