Time to stop the morning press coverage report and start ‘eating the frog'

Despite our myriad career paths, many of us working in PR and communications all started the same way – doing the morning press coverage and news monitoring round‑up that’s a rite of passage for graduates and new starters in the industry. While this tradition is a worthwhile introduction to understanding clients’ businesses and the news agenda, it’s also holding us back, because at a time when our brains are most capable of doing heavy lifting, we’re instead performing rote tasks and beginning a game of email ping‑pong. Thanks to increased AI automation, we should now embrace the idea of eating the frog – throwing off the press coverage comfort blanket and instead starting the day by doing the hardest, highest‑value task first.

What makes this shift important is the simple reality that most people are genuinely productive for far less of the working day than they believe, and the most valuable thinking time tends to fall in the first hours of the morning. Yet this is exactly the period many early‑career colleagues spend formatting screengrabs or copying and pasting headlines. Alongside that, a large proportion of the average working day is absorbed by low‑value tasks that create the impression of progress without offering much in return. Anyone who has watched a morning vanish into a series of links, PDFs and screengrabs of negative Twitter/X posts will know the feeling.

There is also the question of how we develop people. Research suggests our cognitive reserves are strongest early in the day and that tackling more difficult work first improves focus and momentum. Neuroscience reinforces this, noting that concentration declines as decision fatigue sets in. Despite this, many agencies structure their mornings around the least demanding tasks at precisely the moment junior colleagues would benefit most from something more stretching.

Of course, there is a counter‑argument – the famous Navy SEAL philosophy of: “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed,” which argues that beginning with a quick, simple win sets a disciplined tone for the day. It’s a comforting idea, and often a useful one, but sometimes we can lean on it too heavily, mistaking the reassurance of getting something small done for genuine progress. At what point does the quick win becomes the comfort blanket?

This tension has only grown as talk of a “post‑AI communications industry” becomes louder, with the industry insisting comms professionals must evolve into far more strategic advisors – interpreting complexity, anticipating issues and guiding senior decision‑making. But strategy requires space to think, and that space does not exist if the first hour of every morning is spent on tasks that technology is increasingly capable of handling. The sector will not become more strategic simply by saying it should; it will happen only when someone finally cracks an AI‑based media‑monitoring tool that can handle paywalls, trade press, social listening and even AI results that clients care about. When that arrives, junior colleagues can begin their day analysing, interpreting and contributing rather than formatting. 

Reordering the way we start our days would signal that we value thinking over formatting and development over repetition; if communications genuinely wants to be seen as strategic, it starts with giving people the time to be strategic. My only quandary is that if everyone suddenly has that time, we might find ourselves with rather more strategy than anyone quite knows what to do with.