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8 Time-Saving Tips for Government Affairs Professionals

by Daina Goldfinger, Writer, FiscalNote

Busy government affairs professionals often juggle multiple competing priorities. Learn how to save time and boost productivity.

Time saving tips

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If you work in government affairs, your day likely starts with browsing news and monitoring legislation before diving into meetings to set priorities and shape strategies. You’re also likely drafting reports, attending legislative sessions, and building stakeholder relationships — all to demonstrate your organization’s value and return on investment (ROI). 

In our State of Government Affairs 2025 report, which surveyed nearly 1,000 professionals, 54 percent said they worry about missing important legislation, nearly 30 percent are concerned about the volume of issues to monitor, and 31 percent feel anxious about their small team size. Experts say government affairs professionals should stay organized, prioritize their tasks, and leverage technology where appropriate to stay on top of trends and focus on strategic activities. Below, we share eight hacks from professionals to boost productivity and reclaim time.

The 2025 State of Government Affairs

A look at the top trends in the government affairs industry and what you need to be prepared for in 2025.

Use Digital Tools to Automate Legislative Monitoring & Bill Summaries

Our State of Government Affairs report found that 23 percent of respondents spend between 11 and 15 hours weekly monitoring legislation, while about 29 percent spend six to 10 hours curating news and analysis.

To free up time for more strategic tasks, government affairs professionals can leverage digital tools like PolicyNote to automate legislative tracking and bill summaries

Strategically Delegate Mundane Tasks to AI

When juggling competing priorities, professionals can offload monotonous tasks through AI. In our recent report, we found about 48 percent of professionals use a news subscription service, nearly 41 percent use a U.S. legislative tracker like PolicyNote, and 34 percent use generative AI tools.

While AI tools help streamline repetitive tasks, like drafting meeting summaries and organizing outreach lists, it’s critical to review the outputs for accuracy and to ensure they align with your firm’s voice.

Prioritize Tasks by Urgency & Importance

Before you get started on prioritizing and ranking responsibilities, experts say it’s essential to create lists of upcoming projects and their associated tasks. You can then use prioritization frameworks to categorize key deliverables as urgent or important.  

“I recommend applying the Eisenhower Matrix model to categorize legislative prioritization, really focusing on bills that you can categorize by urgency and impact,” says Alex Dickinson, managing partner at Beekeeper Group, a Washington-based communications and public affairs firm. 

To help with workflow planning and prioritization, professionals can use tools like PolicyNote, Asana, and Trello.

Batch Tasks & Block Your Time

When planning your week, you can block off time on your calendar for deep-focus work and batch similar activities together to enhance productivity. Grouping tasks together saves time by preventing additional efforts spent context-switching between different types of projects and issues.

For instance, you may want to schedule stakeholder calls at the same time before moving on to desk work for your healthcare or financial services clients. “Incorporate buffer time between blocks to account for interruptions,” recommends Joseph Hoefer, principal of government relations and public affairs at Monument Advocacy, a bipartisan advocacy firm.

Develop Shared Calendars

Having a shared, centralized calendar that consolidates key events, sessions, meetings, and deadlines is critical for enhancing efficiency and productivity. Shared calendars not only ensure professionals are on the same page but also reduce the risk of missed deadlines and conflicting commitments.

Dickinson recommends creating a shared calendar that maps out key legislative sessions and committee meetings before working backward to set deadlines.

Standardize Processes & Create Templates

In government affairs, there are often recurring meetings, events, or tasks that require a similar set of deliverables — whether it’s legislative briefs or advocacy one-pagers. To streamline these tasks, Dickinson says creating templates can be helpful. “Whatever you can do to templatize and build in that advanced planning can make a big difference,” she adds. 

Government affairs professionals can also standardize processes by using AI tools like PolicyNote to automatically generate summaries for legislative documents and to customize reports on policy data, stakeholders, and actions.

Create Meeting Agendas to Ensure Stakeholder Alignment

When it comes to stakeholder communications, experts stress the importance of creating agendas to ensure structured and productive meetings. “Every meeting should have a clear purpose and agenda,” Hoefer says. “An easy, seamless way to do this is by using calendar invites to attach documents or a quick bullet-point agenda, so no one comes in unprepared.”

When scheduling meetings, Hoefers also emphasizes the importance of managing attendees to save professionals time by excluding those who don’t need to be there.

Minimize Distractions 

Deep focus time is important in any profession, but it’s critical in government affairs, especially since team members are often juggling a variety of issues and clients. To reduce distractions, schedule dedicated desk time and turn off digital notifications to promote concentration.

“When there’s time, I try working in focused 30-minute blocks followed by a five-minute break to reset,” Hoefer says. “But that’s not always the reality.”

Staying Ahead in 2025

Busy government affairs professionals can boost their productivity with PolicyNote, an AI-powered platform that streamlines workflow prioritization, combs through important data, and automates tedious and repetitive tasks, including legislative tracking and bill summaries.

Our software frees up your time for more interesting work. Seth Chase, government affairs director at the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, says the number of issues he needs to follow has increased, so having the right tools is crucial. 

With a growing number of issues and bills to track, government affairs professionals must stay on top to ensure ROI. This means leveraging the right tools, techniques, systems, and templates.

“If you aren’t prepared with a suite of tools that are helping you become more efficient and effective, you’re just going to get stuck in the past,” Dickinson says. 

We’ll Read the Bills. You Read the Room.

Designed for busy government affairs professionals, PolicyNote speeds up the tasks of tracking, summarizing, and briefing on policy. Get out of your inbox and into the rooms where decisions happen. Go beyond bill tracking with PolicyNote.

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