Running a gaming clan can get overwhelming for just about anyone. If you pile your clan responsibilities on top of school or work, sometimes it can get down right impossible. The key to dealing with this problem is making the most of your time. If you only have one hour a day to work on clan duties, make sure you work for that hour instead of becoming sidetracked with other things. Personally, I have a hard time staying on track, so there are a few things I like to do to keep myself headed in the right direction:

To-Do Lists. Write everything down. Have a plan before you go in. If you take care of all the thinking ahead of time, you can cut out the awkward “Ok….what now?” waiting periods in between different tasks. Make your to-do lists semi detailed, but don’t go overboard with it. Give yourself a basic outline of what you want to accomplish for that day.

Establish Priorities. Make sure whatever your working on is the absolute best thing you could be working on at the time. If what your doing at the time isn’t going to benefit you the most, change it up. Save the less important jobs for when you have a bit of free time.

Keep A Notebook (And up to date) You’d be surprised how much keeping a notebook can help. Just to have all of your thoughts there in front of you sometimes saves you alot of mental stress when you’re trrying to get things done. Write anything of any importance in the notebook.

Of course staying organized is really more of a personality trait than anything else, but if you’re trying to make strides in the right direction then there are always things you can do to help yourself out.

Balancing Gaming and Clan Time

When you volunteer to become a clan leader, you are essentially volunteering your free time to deal with petty disagreements and babysit a bunch of 16 year olds. However, you can not spend all of your time out-of-game, because you still have to set an example for your members. This example should be that gaming is important. You have to try to promote your forum without making it the main attraction.

So, to set an example you need to appear (each and every day pretty much) in your server/channel, actively playing the game in which you formed for. Sometimes a Clan’s workload can pile up and it seems like you’ll never get some time to yourself just to play the game. The 3 things I did as a leader to free up some gaming time for myself were:

Set A Schedule

Everyday before I started doing whatever it is that I had to do for the clan, I would make a quick list of the things I wanted to accomplish, and give myself time limits on accomplishing them. It looked something like this:

15 minutes forum time
Correct website errors for 20 minutes
Research new server website for 20 minutes
etc
etc

Then at the very end I would try to schedule myself at least a half hour to an hour of gaming before I headed out to do other things for the night. It is important that your members see you taking a real interest in the game as well.

Delegating

Share the workload. You don’t have to be the one to do everything. Just make sure those members who do help you out are rewarded.

Take Days Off

Even full time jobs allow themselves 2 days off a week. Every now and then grant yourself a break from the hard work and just go have fun.

It is very important that you give yourself some time to play the game, or things will start to get monotonous. Remember why you created the clan in the first place.