This handout accompanies a training session and slides -- How to do more enterprise reporting while still feeding the daily beast -- taught by Chris Coates at Illinois NewsTrain and by Amy Chance at Fresno NewsTrain. Coates is the executive editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and former Central Illinois editor for Lee Enterprises. Chance is the political editor for The Sacramento Bee. Linda Austin is project co-director for NewsTrain. For more information on the News Leaders Association's NewsTrain, see https://www.newsleaders.org/newstrain.

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Time-management tips for journalists
Linda Austin | @LindaAustin_ | laustin.newstrain@gmail.com
What everyone tells you about time management
• Dieters are told to keep a diary of what they eat for a week to see where their calories are going.
To get a grip on where your time is going, track how you use every work minute for a week
using a service such as Tracking Time (free for the basic level) or a paper diary. Eliminate the
time wasters.
• Custom-tailored time management, by Jill Geisler, Poynter.org. Offers an alternative to the
“time tracking” method of evaluating where your time goes. Instead, it asks questions about
your demands, assumptions and preferences to identify time savers and wasters in your day.
• Plan your day at the beginning of the day. Schedule those tasks that require your most
productive self during those times when you are typically at your best. Set goals and reward
yourself for achieving them.
• Make appointments with yourself to accomplish tasks, including scheduling breaks. If it’s an
unpleasant task, you can look forward to its being over at a set time.
• Multitasking doesn’t work. Block out interruptions and stick with one task until you complete
it.
• Cluster making phone calls and checking emails into set periods. Don’t respond like Pavlov’s
dog every time an email pings or a phone rings.
• Don’t touch a piece of paper more than once. Decide what to do with it: file it or toss it. Or if
that approach isn’t working for you, consider Matt Baier’s approach to handling paper.
• Know the purpose of the meeting (or the phone call) before you call a meeting (or make a
phone call). Evaluate how well the meeting or call went after it’s over and address how to deal
with what was missing the next time. Never hold a meeting without an agenda or finish a
meeting without assigning next steps to specific people. Then, hold them accountable.
• Take a tech sabbath. Unplug for a day a week. If you can’t afford an entire day initially, start
with a few hours where you turn off the phone and computer.
Tips on time management specific to journalists
• Use the two-notebook approach and “swiss-cheese” in projects. In one notebook, take your
notes on daily stories. In a second notebook, take notes on a longer-term story. After every
interview or web search on your longer-term story, make a note of the next person you need to
contact or the next document request you need to make to advance the story. If you have 15
minutes during the day while you’re waiting on call-backs on a daily, open your longer-term
notebook and try to complete the next task on your list for the project. It’s called swiss-
cheesing in projects because you are filling the holes in the day with slow but steady progress
on your longer-term story.
• Periodically ask yourself: what’s the best story on my beat that I’m not getting to right now?
Discuss with your editor: why aren’t you getting to it?
• When people contact you about a story, record their name and contact info, as well as a brief
description of them, in a spreadsheet. Then when you’re looking for a “real person” to illustrate
a story, search your list.

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• When planning stories, do several stories about different aspects of the same subject, e.g.,
trends in big-box retailers, at the same time. That way, you can interview the same experts on
the different aspects at the same time.
• When trying to develop quasi-officials (important behind-the-scenes players) as sources,
consider doing a newsmaker profile of the person as a way to get to know him/her better.
• Consider crowdsourcing. Read how then-Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold turned
to his Twitter followers to help locate Trump portraits paid for by Trump’s charity. Or how
ProPublica used a Facebook group to help report its investigation into patient harm.
• Cultivate secretaries/administrative assistants. Besides being the gatekeepers, they also know
where all the bodies are buried.
• Get out of the office. If you’re on the education beat, arrange to have lunch at a different school
on a regular basis. If you’re on the religion beat, attend a religious service of a different sort on
a regular basis. Go periodically to defining events in your community, whether that’s the rodeo,
a bluegrass festival or a Veterans Day parade. Ask: what’s the best news story in your area that
you haven’t seen reported yet in the media?
• Reporters should follow a set workflow for each story. Report, tweet, file for the web, edit and
file photos, edit and file video, or whatever order works for you and your editor.
• Rotate daily duties, such as which editor is signing off on page proofs nightly, to conserve
editor energy. You might also rotate the “firefighter of the day” on your staff to handle that
day’s breaking news.
Free time-saving tools for journalists
• Check CUNY journalism Professor Jeremy Caplan’s 30 Tools in 60 Minutes handout:
bit.ly/wondertools From transcribing interviews with Otter to automating routine processes
with IFTTT, this is a treasure trove. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter, Wonder Tools.
• Ren LaForme’s weekly newsletter, Try This! — Tools for Journalism, often contains time-
saving tools, but it is paused. Archives are here.
• Freelance reporter Samantha Sunne’s newsletter, Tools for Reporters, shares a new tool every
two weeks.
• Set up Google Alerts for new content on the web about people or subjects you’re following.
• Use Follow that Page or visualping to be notified of changes in the content of web pages you
follow.
• If you follow companies, sign up for sqoop.com’s free tracking services for journalists. Set up
searches to get an email when something new is filed about a company with the SEC, U.S.
Patent Office, the federal courts, the U.S. Department of Justice and/or U.S. Attorney’s Offices.
• Take the free Google News Initiative training available through SPJ. Or take Google’s self-
paced, online training; tap the 3-line “hamburger” to see courses and tools. Learn how to use
Google Street View to access mug shots of buildings and Google Maps to create interactive
maps.
• SPJ offers similar free training on Facebook tools, such as Live, Groups and CrowdTangle, that
help journalists leverage Facebook and Instagram for news gathering, storytelling and
connecting with their followers.
• Get free access to Flourish to “create responsive visualizations, maps, quizzes, timelines, photo
sliders, even AR/VR projects.”
• Use Airtable, an easy-to-use shareable spreadsheet for maintaining tickler files and tracking
projects.
• Canva has free templates to create graphics for social media posts.

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• The Atlas of Surveillance is a database of police technology maintained by the Electronic
Frontier Foundation that can be searched by a city, county, state or agency.
• Investigative Reporters & Editors has free or low-cost databases that can be localized, as does
ProPublica.
How to stop doing or do differently in your newsroom
• How newsrooms can do less work but have more impact,
• How the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel focused on prioritizing with a “Stop Doing” list
• Want to find time for more enterprise reporting? Dive into analytics.
• Want newsroom innovation? Start with a STOP list.
• Local Edition: Knowing your newsroom’s mission can help you say no, by Kristen Hare,
Poynter.org
• 10 tips for preventing staff burnout in spite of more work, fewer resources, by Jill Geisler,
Poynter.org
SOURCES: How to manage time with 10 tips that work, from Entrepreneur magazine; How to
manage your time effectively, from the University of Kent (includes a time-management
questionnaire); 15 tips on time management for business journalists, by Tami Luhby; interview, Keith
Kohn, local news editor, The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C.