The Tasks That Keep Us Stuck

Last week’s post on getting unstuck had a big response.

It’s pretty easy to find a lot of tasks you should be doing.

It’s far harder to find a group of tasks you should stop doing as soon as possible .

Here are some more things you probably want to stop doing as soon as possible.

• Looking for stock images.
• Looking for better tools.
• Creating advice content.
• Creating news content about the sector/industry.
• Welcoming every new member.
• Hashtag chats.
• Replying and participating in every discussion.
• Setting up interviews/soliciting posts from people.
• Posting new discussions every day.
• Dealing with member complaints.
• Posting on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Google+.
• Creating analytics dashboards.

Many of these things that help the community get off the ground stop it from growing any further. Beyond a point, you need to work on the tasks that have the biggest possible impact over the long-term.

Some of these tasks you can outsource to volunteers, colleagues, or virtual assistants. Others just don’t lead to rapid enough levels of growth to justify you doing them anymore. Once your community has reached the inception stage, where it’s not going to die if you step back for a few days, you can shift your efforts to the big wins.

Here’s a simple thought process for deciding what to work on.

Spend most of your time working on the activities which will have the longest-term impact upon most of your members.

An inbound link from a top site can keep driving new members to your community for years. Optimising the onboarding system has an indefinite impact. Recruiting volunteers has a big long-term impact. Hosting events brings people together and creates a stronger sense of community.

All of these will help you get unstuck. But you have to free up your own time first. Keep a record if you like. You might be surprised just where all your time goes.

FeverBee SPRINT – The Giant Unstuck Event

At FeverBee SPRINT, we’re going to work together in both our workshops and talk sessions to help you get unstuck. We aim to highlight the biggest impact tasks – the tasks that increase the level of growth and activity not by 5% to 10%, but to showcase examples of people that have applied our processes to get 25% to 50% increases.

The only place to get those insights is to go deep into psychology. I really hope you’ll join us, 14 fantastic expert speakers, and 300+ community professionals: http://sprint.feverbee.com.