Project management for PR agencies, one week at a time

It is 8:40 on a Tuesday. The morning monitoring has thrown up a regulator statement that touches two of your clients, and one has already emailed asking what you think. The AD wants a reactive comment drafted, lines to take agreed and the whole thing pitched before the story goes cold, which means before about two o'clock. Four things were already booked for today, one of them a sell-in that has slipped twice, so something has to move to Thursday, and you have nine minutes to work out what and tell the AE who is already halfway through the media list.

That nine minutes of deciding what gets bumped is the job, and it is a fair description of what project management for PR agencies actually means on a morning like this: not the drafting that follows, but knowing what moves and who needs telling before a word gets written.

Two clocks, and neither of them stops

Project management for PR agencies has to serve two clocks at once. The slow one is the retainer month: forward planner at the top, pitching and sell-in through the middle, then a coverage report and an hours-against-scope reckoning that lands after next month's fee has already been invoiced. Rolling agreements with a notice period make the month the real planning unit, and a quiet month before a renewal conversation is a commercial problem.

The fast clock is the news. A journalist request lands on Qwoted, a competitor announces, and the two releases already promised for today are still promised for today. Cutting across both are the set pieces with real dates: a funding announcement, a product launch, a data study, a press trip. They run on a four-to-eight-week countdown that usually has legal or investor sign-off buried somewhere in the middle, and by the time launch day arrives it is timed out hour by hour. A launch does not end cleanly, because the retainer absorbs whatever comes after it: the follow-up pitches first, then the coverage report, and eventually the client asking why Tier 1 did not bite.

When the morning monitoring rewrites the day

In ToDoing a task lives on a person and a day, and the week is the unit. My Week is your own list, and the Overview grid is the whole team's week, rows by people or rows by projects, built off the same underlying data, so nobody ends up working from a status doc that has quietly gone out of date.

When the regulator statement lands, you open the grid, drag Tuesday's sell-in onto Thursday, drag the coverage report onto the AE who has capacity, and drop the reactive comment into today. Everyone sees it in under a second, so nobody goes hunting for the latest version in the WIP thread. Anything left unticked at the end of the day rolls forward to today by itself, which matters when half the week is two-hour jobs that got bumped by something louder. Work with no date yet sits in a Someday column until the forward planner catches up with it, which is the same instinct behind plan the week, not the backlog.

Embargo day, and the four tasks behind it

Move a launch date and you have to re-brief every journalist who already agreed to hold the story, and an embargo that breaks early rarely breaks in your favour. In ToDoing, milestones sit on the same calendar as tasks, in the project's colour, so the gap between "client approval due" and the four tasks still sitting behind it shows up days early rather than on the morning of. Each project gets a timeline and a workplan you can split into sections, either a list or a board, and most PR teams end up with one section per stage rather than one column for everything: draft and review, client and legal sign-off, media list, embargo offers, assets, lines to take, timing plan. Drag a milestone flag when the client's legal team goes quiet for a week, and the whole team's grid moves with it there and then, which is more than you can say for a status doc or a spreadsheet everyone has to remember to update by hand.

Five clients each, and nobody on one thing all day

Nobody in a ten-person firm is idle. An AM is split across four accounts, the founder is still senior counsel on the two biggest, and the honest answer to "can we take this on" lives in a spreadsheet nobody has updated. Rows by people on the Overview grid answer it at a glance, with each client's colour showing who has three retainers and a launch in the same week.

Leave, on the Pro plan, puts the other half of that picture in the same place, covering half days, one named approver per person, running balances, public holidays by country and region, and a team wall chart, so you can see the AE is off on Friday before you promise a client a Friday sell-in she cannot make. You can feed the leave calendar out to any app that takes a subscription link, or mirror a leave calendar you already keep.

Over-servicing that you find in week two, not at the invoice

Retainer scope creep is easy to lose sight of week to week, and it tends to become visible only once it is already expensive. On the Enterprise plan, ticking a task done logs the time it was planned for, with a one-tap adjust if the pitch call ran long. Per project, you choose days or hours, set a budget, and watch a burn bar. The report splits by person and by task type, and exports to CSV for the scope conversation. Rates stay admin only, and there are no timers to run or timesheets to chase.

Estimation, also Enterprise, reads your own completed history for a median and a p80 per task type, the number you come in under eight times out of ten. The fee for the next launch then comes off measured effort rather than a guess, quotes print for the client, and an accuracy view shows how close you were.

What ToDoing does not do for a PR agency

There is quite a lot ToDoing deliberately does not do for a PR agency, starting with anything like a media database, journalist contacts, a pitch tracker, or a way to put a release on a wire. Monitoring, cuttings, alerts and sentiment scoring happen elsewhere, so the coverage report the client actually opens each month, with its reach and message pull-through, never comes from here. There is no measurement layer at all: ToDoing can show budget burn against a project, but it will not turn hours into a bill or reconcile a retainer fee. Status and contact reports still go out in the client's own template, because there is no client portal. A release moving through legal gets no version control here, and social scheduling, asset libraries and new-business CRM are somebody else's software. Email is not connected either, so a reply sitting in an inbox does not become a task.

Muck Rack or Prowly, your monitoring tool, Xero, and Google Docs for the release all stay exactly where they are; ToDoing sits underneath them, tracking who is doing what this week across five clients.

Common questions from PR agencies

What project management software do small PR agencies use?

Most run on a shared doc and a WIP spreadsheet until three or four clients each break it. ToDoing fits a team of roughly 3 to 15 people who plan by the week and get interrupted daily. Three people and three clients fit the free plan, but much above 15 and you are past what this is built for.

Can ToDoing replace our status report and coverage report?

No. The status report goes out in the client's format, and the coverage report needs cuttings and reach ToDoing never sees. What it replaces is the internal WIP spreadsheet you rebuild every Monday.

How do PR agencies track retainer hours against scope?

Most reconstruct it late, off timesheets. In ToDoing, time capture and a per-project budget with a burn bar sit on the Enterprise plan, so you can see at week two that an account is running hot. Turning that into an invoice or reconciling the fee happens in your finance tool.

How much does it cost?

At the time of writing, July 2026: Pro is $2 per person per month or $20 per year, Enterprise is $6 per person per month or $60 per year. Both come with a 14-day full trial. Free covers 3 people and 3 projects and never asks for a card. If you are weighing it against a resourcing tool, see ToDoing vs Float or ToDoing vs Monday.

Your Tuesday can still get hijacked by a regulator statement, a slipped sell-in, or whatever the news cycle throws at it next, and ToDoing will not stop any of that happening. It just means everyone on the team can see, in a second or two, what moved and who is holding it now, rather than piecing it together secondhand later in the week.

ToDoing also works for accounting firms, architects, consulting firms, creative agencies, engineering consultancies, event planners, interior design studios, law firms, recruitment agencies, software studios, video production.