What to stop doing: freeing up your time

When a membership grows, tasks accumulate. Every new course, channel, event and tool adds a little recurring work, and almost nothing is ever taken away. A few years in, you're doing dozens of things every week, many of them started for reasons that no longer apply. You feel stretched, yet when you look at the list, every item seems necessary. It usually isn't.

Most time advice focuses on doing things faster. This article is about the more powerful move: deciding what to stop doing altogether. A time audit, where you list your recurring work and judge each task on what it really returns, almost always turns up hours you can take back.

List everything you do on repeat

Start with a full inventory of recurring tasks, not just the big ones. Go through your calendar, your task list, your sent email and a typical working week, and write down everything you do at least monthly. Include small tasks such as posting in three social channels, checking a dashboard nobody acts on or manually tagging new members. Small tasks are often where the waste hides.

Next to each task, note roughly how many hours it takes a month. Estimates are fine. They're enough to show where the hours really go, and the totals are often surprising.

Score each task on two questions

For every item on your list, ask:

1. What does it return? Does it bring in members, keep members, prevent a problem or make members' lives noticeably better? Or does it just feel productive?
2. Does it need you? Does it depend on your expertise, voice or judgment, or could someone or something else do it to an acceptable standard?

Rate each task high, medium or low on both. Be honest about what you actually know. If you can't say what a task returns, that's useful information in itself.

Decide: stop, shrink, systematize or hand off

Each task now falls into one of four decisions:

• Stop: low return, whoever does it. Drop it entirely.
• Shrink: some return, but more effort than it deserves. Do it less often or to a simpler standard.
• Systematize: worthwhile and repetitive. Turn it into a template, procedure or automation.
• Hand off: worthwhile but doesn't need you. Delegate it to an assistant, freelancer or volunteer.

What remains, the high-return work that genuinely needs you, is where your freed-up time should go.

Tasks owners often keep doing for no good reason

Every membership is different, but some tasks turn up in audit after audit:

• Posting on every social network when new members come mainly from one or two.
• Writing a fresh answer to a question you've answered many times, instead of using a saved reply or help article.
• Producing content faster than members can keep up with it.
• Editing videos to a polish members don't notice or need.
• Running a live session that a handful of people attend, in a format that hasn't changed in years.
• Compiling reports you never make decisions from.
• Doing favors, such as private reviews or custom advice, that were never part of the membership.
• Maintaining a feature or section very few members use.

A worked example: Maren's audit

Maren runs a hypothetical kayaking skills membership with lesson videos, a monthly live Q&A and a community forum. She feels constantly behind, so she lists her recurring tasks with rough monthly hours:

Social posts on four networks, 12 hours: almost all new members arrive from one of them. Decision: shrink to one network, 4 hours.

Weekly member newsletter, 8 hours: members read it and mention it. Decision: keep it, but build a template, 5 hours.

Personal video reviews of members' paddling technique, 10 hours: started as a favor, now expected. Decision: stop as a free extra and offer it as a paid add-on.

Manually adding new members to forum groups, 3 hours: Decision: systematize with an automatic rule.

Support inbox, 10 hours: Decision: hand routine questions to a part-time assistant with saved replies, leaving 3 hours of her own.

Monthly live Q&A, 4 hours: well attended and loved. Decision: keep.

Her audit frees around thirty hours a month. She puts half into the intermediate course members keep asking for and keeps the other half as breathing room.

Stop carefully when members will notice

Some tasks can simply end. Others are visible to members, and dropping them without explanation feels like a cut in value. For anything members might miss, run a trial: pause it for a month or two and watch for reactions in support, the community and cancellation reasons. Silence usually means it wasn't valued as much as you feared.

When you do stop something visible, tell members briefly and focus on what they gain:

We're retiring the weekly roundup so we can put that time into the intermediate course many of you have asked for. Every past roundup stays in the library.

For tasks you hand off, write a short procedure first; hiring a virtual assistant shows how to hand over the first tasks well. And if you're auditing because you're exhausted rather than merely busy, read recognizing and preventing burnout too. Cutting tasks helps, but it isn't the whole answer.

Run your own audit

1. List every task you do at least monthly and estimate its hours.
2. Rate each on what it returns and whether it needs you.
3. Assign stop, shrink, systematize or hand off to every low or medium task.
4. Act on the three biggest time savings first.
5. Pause anything visible for a trial period before stopping it for good.
6. Decide in advance where the freed hours will go, or they'll quietly fill up again.
7. Repeat the audit once or twice a year.