What is your time management process for your forum?

Being your own boss can become quite stressful. Considering the time spent on brand marketing, observation of the competition in your chosen niche, maintaining a social media presence, member inquiries and security.. what time management strategy do you use to ensure your community runs smoothly?

Do you have a calender outlining a specific date at which you do the security checks?

Do you simply appoint most active user as a moderator to oversea a " honey do " list of items to encourage the growth of your community?

Creating a community worth appreciating takes time, nourishment and an unaltered sense of commitment. Utilizing programs such as Google Calendar and Evernote seem to keep me semi in balance but I'm finding with my new journey into the wonderful world of forum creation... those options don't mix well with my content creation services, clients and everyday tasks. What program do you use to keep track of your ever extending to do lists?

 

I have two administrators, myself and one other person whom I've known personally and worked with on forums for over ten years.
I also have two global moderators, whom I worked with for five or more years before recruiting them to my site full-time.
The four of us cover the site virtually 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
We don't calendar things out because we don't have to. Our work schedules calendar things out for us.
The three of them handle the vast majority of everything on the front end.
That leaves me free to spend nearly all of my time on the backend administration.
Maybe it's because I've been doing it since the 1980's and the days of AOL Bulletin Board but I do everything out of routine.
If any of the forum software had the insight to include a useful calendar I would probably use it but they don't.

 

Wow, you are awesome! Lol days of the AOL Bulletin Board.... so you and brandon are the masters .

Touche. I'll look into additional moderators.

 

I try and manage my forum in my spare time - my forum is mainly a hobby thing. I'm still in school, so most of my time is dedicated to that

I have one super moderator, however that's mainly incase I have an accident an none of the new messages get through moderation, as I am on my site regularly enough that they don't really have to do anything (in fact, the super moderator is a member of this forum as well...). They do a good job though

 

I spend an awful lot of time on my forum, sometimes even the whole day. It just depends in what mood I'm in. That said, I don't necessarily do anything; it just depends again on what mood I'm in and what I can feel I can bring to the forum that day. I don't bother researching my niche or observing the competition; I just go with the flow. I post on the forum, adjust settings if necessary, add modifications and make adjustments. I'm a massive noob when it comes to coding and maintenance so either I rely on resources or just don't bother. I backup the forum every-now-and-again, but that's essentially the only time I do anything with the files other than installing mods. I don't have a clue how to operate the database etc.

I try to focus on the community, content production and advertising than anything else.