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One issue that would sometimes arise in our old public discussion forums could be described as admin baiting.

This is when some members assert the right to ask an administrative question, challenge a community rule or its application, or challenge an admin decision – by posting a message in the forum community for all to see.

From the perspective of an individual member, this makes some degree of sense. That person is a member of the community and asserts the right to pose such questions or challenges, expecting a staff member to answer them. From their perspective it may seem similar to sending an email or private message to a staff member. They could also justify posting the message publicly by considering that maybe other members would like to chime in as well, or perhaps others might be interested in the answers. So yeah, on that level I agree that it may seem like a reasonable thing to do.

This practice gets very problematic when you consider the admin perspective though. From the admin’s viewpoint, it’s much easier to see why this sort of behavior could be seen as an unreasonable form of entitlement.

Interestingly, I virtually never see this kind of behavior in certain groups that I’ve participated in, including groups consisting of entrepreneurs, coaches, or website owners. When I think about the culture of those groups, I’d say that most members would likely consider it rude or obnoxious to do this. Those community cultures wouldn’t reward this kind of behavior and would frown on it if a member did this, especially if it happened semi-regularly. They’d expect admin-related matters to be handled privately. When admin matters are handled within the public space of the group, there can be a real risk of stirring up drama and distraction for the community.

In other communities, this type of behavior can be very common, including in communities I’ve managed. A lot of communities have it; it’s usually just a question of how much. If you’ve ever managed your own community, how often have you seen members practice admin baiting? Did you feel obligated to answer publicly?

In our public forums, I didn’t see this as too big of a deal. We had a dozen volunteer moderators, so the load was spread around. My ex-wife Erin and I were also active in the forums, so we could field these types of questions or concerns when they came up. We didn’t necessarily see it as a problem, just a routine part of managing an online community.

The reason I use the admin baiting label is that from an admin perspective, there’s a sense of obligation to personally reply. You want to be helpful to community members, including answering questions and addressing concerns. But those good intentions can really trap you sometimes, even when you can see the nature of the trap well in advance.

For many instances of admin baiting, a quick reply or two is all it takes to handle the request – no big deal. But what if the matter is contentious? What if other members have different opinions about the initial post? What if you can predict that it would lead to a complex discussion, and you’d rather not take the time to engage in that? That’s where it begins to feel like you’ve been baited into a potential time and energy sink. Have you ever taken the bait and felt icky about it afterwards?

What if you simply ignore such requests? Community members may not like that. You may not like it either. Some may start trying to answer on your behalf, with posts that start with, “Maybe they …” or “Maybe it’s because …” Some members may post false or misleading answers – it happens. Members could even start debating with each other about it, right in front of you. If you wait too long, members may start posting conspiracy theories to explain your silence.

If you give a quick, short reply, some members may be unsatisfied with it, concluding that you’re being illusive. They may ask more follow-up questions, which only draws more attention to the discussion, inviting even more replies from other members. And if you reply to those, you may invite even more.

On the other hand, if you provide a long answer, trying to dispatch with the issue in a single reply, you actually give people more hooks to latch onto for asking more follow-up questions and/or debating with you.

How this plays out will differ greatly from group to group, but it’s easy for it to appear that you have no good options. As soon as a member posts the initial admin baiting message, you may feel that you have little choice but to take the bait, even if you can predict that there will be negative effects without much upside, like stirring up a lot of drama.

I’ve experienced this dynamic in Conscious Growth Club as well, ever since we started in 2017. In the beginning, having open discussions about the administrative aspects of the group made sense to me. It was a co-creative effort, I maintained a progress log within the group, and these open discussions seemed like a good way to be transparent with members and keep them in the loop. It felt sort of like maintaining a friendly open door policy.

Sometimes it was a bit draining though. I didn’t always want to share information on decisions if I thought people might want to debate it a lot, especially if I was busy with other projects. Sometimes I also felt that people over-stepped in their demands for info, as if they were entitled to interview me about the details whenever a member quit the group or was ejected. More than one I would see an admin baiting post and say to myself, “Oh great… this is going to lead to some drama for a few days.”

I adapted as best I could. I learned to detach emotionally, answer honestly, and let such discussions run their course. I got used to dealing with all sorts of member dynamics. I’ve a lot of practice since I’ve been involved in online communities since 1994, including founding a few of them. I’ve spent well over 10 years of my life as the head admin of one community or another. For some reason though, it took me a really long time to feel like I really understood admin baiting and why it can be so problematic. Basically I dealt with so much of it that I developed strong coping skills over a period of years without stopping to question the framing behind the issue.

Recently there was another round of this in CGC, which led to days of discussion and many dozens of posts, and some members still consider it unresolved to their satisfaction. Along the way I kept feeling that there was something entirely wrong with this approach.

I’m not entirely sure if this is related, but I’m also doing a 31-day dietary experiment this month – no grains, no legumes/beans, and no sugar for the month of August. I often experience improvements in mental and emotional clarity when I experiment with more restrictive diets. So it’s possible that this was a contributing factor to seeing the problem from a different perspective.

Eventually this question popped into my mind, and it was a game-changer for me:

Is it reasonable for members to assume the right to engage in admin baiting by posting a question, challenge, or demand related to community policies or admin decisions within the community forums, and thereby to obligate me (or any staff member) to answer them?

What do you think? Do you think that’s a reasonable privilege that a community member should have? Think about it. What’s your honest opinion on this?

Even though this privilege isn’t explicitly granted or promised, I think a lot of community members assume that it’s reasonable. They may even feel it’s unreasonable to be told otherwise. And so they may engage in the practice without even giving it much thought. It’s not unlike sending an email, right?

But if I were to ask other community managers or entrepreneurs this particular question, I think more of them would shake their heads and recognize just how unreasonable it is. It’s a disempowering obligation.

That’s when I finally realized – this assumption isn’t reasonable at all. It’s actually a ridiculously unreasonable expectation that anyone in the community should be able to assert the right to bind me to a potentially time-consuming group discussion – any time they want, as often as they want.

Note that this is entirely different from one-on-one communication, like sending someone an email. Expecting decent customer service does seem reasonable – privately.

This problem can easily creep up on admins in a slippery slope manner. Many admin-related questions are no problem to answer publicly in a forum setting. Some are just a little more complex but still easily dispatched. But every now and then, usually at random intervals, a more complex or contentious case of admin baiting can occur, and now you’re looking at many hours of work – and potentially some community drama – if you accept that invite.

Do you, as a community admin, have the freedom to say no to such invitations? Can’t you just decline, especially when you can clearly see the downsides of getting involved?

Well, how would you do that, assuming you care about maintaining a quality community with a positive and mutually supportive culture?

Will it work if you ignore it? No, we covered that already. In many cases that will make it worse.

Will it work if you reply, “No comment” or equivalent? Probably not since some members may interpret that as meaning that you have something to hide.

The problem is actually upstream. Once someone has engaged in admin baiting, your good options are limited, and they all require some time investment – time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Admin baiting is like going to a party at someone’s house, and sometime during the party, you click your glass to get everyone’s attention, and then you ask the host a question, or you challenge the host to explain something, or you demand that the host change or fix something at the party. You’ve effectively baited the host into having to respond, not just to you but now to everyone in the room. And no matter what kind of reply the host gives, anyone else in the room may assert the right to continue discussing, debating with, or interviewing the host. This could last for a minute… or 10 minutes… or the rest of the evening. The host never really had a good option after being put on the spot, and their ability to engage with the party the way they’d have preferred was derailed to some extent.

For in-person settings like a party or live event, this kind of behavior is typically considered a bit obnoxious except in certain limited settings. But people tend to think differently about online communities. They don’t see all the other people while looking at a forum window, so the social cues aren’t the same.

Within the past several days, I pondered how to solve this problem. I still want to serve community members. I still like being able to provide some transparency. Is there a win-win solution that would serve the same purpose without the practice of admin baiting?

If we take admin baiting off the table, what could we do instead? I think the basic solution looks like this (and “thank you” to the friend who suggested this phrasing):

Take it outside.

In other words, handle administrative issues privately, via one-on-one communication such as email or private messages. Don’t handle them within the community space in front of all of the other members.

Such interactions are likely to be faster and shorter, and they don’t clutter the community with admin-related discussions (especially lengthy ones).

Admin baiting often turns into member baiting as well. Generally speaking members usually prefer to engage with a community on the basis of the community’s core focus and purpose. But if an admin-related discussion arises, especially a complex or contentious one, it can easily draw other members into the discussion, even though they’d probably be better served by focusing on other discussions instead.

An issue that a few members care enough about to engage in a private exchange with an admin could blow up to rope in 3x, 5x, or 10x as many members if discussed openly in the community space. That potentially creates a lot more burden for both the admins and the members.

Now if an admin sees that multiple members are having the same sort of requests through private interactions, the admin can disseminate relevant information more widely, such as by adding an item to a FAQ or by sending out a group email. But in that case it’s a choice – an option – not an immediate obligation.

I saw many other potential benefits to the removal of admin baiting, including better focus for the community, fewer distractions, better community morale, and more value for the members. Consequently, I’ve opted to test this approach in CGC. Yesterday I updated our member rules and guidelines to prohibit admin baiting in the community, steering members to handle admin-related items through private communication, including admin-related questions, sharing feedback on decisions, and more.

It’s barely been 24 hours, and I’m already seeing benefits from this approach. For starters, it’s predictable that this will save a lot of time, energy, and angst down the road. My wife Rachelle is our Community Manager, and she’s also pleased with this change since it makes her job much easier too.

Secondly, the initial feedback and questions that are coming through privately have been thoughtful, useful, and actionable. I like that communicating with a member one-on-one feels more intimate than doing it in the public space of the community forums. I can focus more intently on one person’s questions, comments, or concerns instead of seeing a long page of mixed messaging to decipher.

I can understand that some members may see this as a move away from transparency because we won’t be having open discussions about admin policies and decisions in the forums. I thought about that in advance, and my thinking was that this is probably a neutral type of change transparency-wise. It doesn’t limit my ability to share information with the members. It just gives me more options for doing so.

If I really want to do so, I can still invite an open discussion regarding a policy or decision if I think it would be useful and reasonable. So I always have that option; it just isn’t obligatory. I can see some situations where that might be useful and productive.

Also, there’s still the open door for members to share the same types of issues. We’re just handling this communication outside of the community space.

I like quality feedback, especially when it’s actionable. I’m okay with some debating now and then. I like helping customers and CGC members. And gradually I’ve been learning that some communication is much better suited to a private, one-on-one format.

Even when you consider the transparency aspects, it’s easier to be transparent in one-on-one communication, especially when the relationship is high-trust, and you can customize the communication for each person.

In some ways this is similar to the decision I made not to have public comments on my blog. I actually started with having comments when I began blogging in 2004, but I removed that option in 2005 after it reached about 100 comments per day. What happened afterwards was that I received private feedback via email that was much lower in volume and much higher in quality. I found that to be a very positive change, which is why I’ve kept it this way for 15 years now. I have no regrets about that; it still seems like it was a wise change.

Interestingly, people are more likely to add posts to a community discussion than to send a private message about it. A blog post that might have garnered 100 public comments may generate only a few private emails, sometimes none at all. A forum post on an issue that could have generated dozens of replies may generate just a handful of private messages.

You might think there would be a lot of redundancy from having to field the same types of questions and comments privately, but it’s actually the opposite. There’s way more redundancy when discussions are public. When people send private messages, they tend to be more unique and varied. I’m still pondering why that is. Maybe it’s because people are strongly influenced by what they read in a discussion, and it narrows their focus.

I genuinely feel this type of change is better for our members too, although I can understand why it may be harder to see that when the change is still fresh. I imagine that it will take some members a bit of time to get used to it, but I think they’ll grow to like it when they see how much simpler and smoother it is for all involved.

I think it has a lot of promise, but it is reversible, so if for some reason it doesn’t work out, we can always revert back to the old ways if necessary. I’d be reticent to return to the old reality though, and I’m hopeful that this change will prove itself to be an intelligent, win-win solution. It’s also pretty flexible, so if problems arise there are still plenty of ways to tweak it. In fact, if you know of a better approach than what I’ve outlined here, please do let me know about it. I’m still on the lookout for intelligent communication practices for online communities.

Lastly, I want to make it clear that I harbor no resentment towards anyone who has engaged in this practice in any community I’ve managed. It’s the behavioral pattern and its consequences that I’m addressing here. I surely must admit that in some communities, I occasionally engaged in admin baiting too, not seeing it from the admin perspective at the time. Going forward I want to watch out for this pattern within myself and do my best to “take it outside” for matters that would be more gracefully handled in private.

It’s interesting what solutions can emerge when we look at a problem or challenge from multiple angles.

In many jobs your working hours are performance hours. You’re expected to do the work that creates value. If you’re a programmer, you get paid to program. If you’re a lawyer, you get paid to help people solve legal problems.

But in some jobs, performance is just a small slice of paid time on the job.

Consider a professional basketball player, for instance. The performance time is during competitive games with other teams. Game time performance is what creates the value for the franchise, the fans, the sponsors, and the other stakeholders.

But for the athletes, most of the time on the job isn’t performance time. During those other hours, they’re training, practicing, being coached, preparing, recovering, etc. Of course this is still important work so they can be prepared to perform well during televised games.

What if you currently do work that’s mostly performance but you approach it like a professional athlete? What would that look like?

Where is your job closest to the performance of a pro athlete? Which activities really count in terms of delivering value and earning your pay?

Most likely your hours on the job aren’t all equal in terms of delivering value. Some activities may be more critical than others, especially when it comes to career advancement or business success.

Do you know what those critical activities are?

Once you know the critical activities, where’s the training portion of your day? Where’s the ongoing investment in further honing your skills, so you can get better and better at the performance side? Are you investing in enough training… or barely any?

I could frame blogging as a performance activity since my articles are public facing and provide value to people. I could then imagine many hours of private journaling, reading, experimenting, and exploring to be training and practice.

Alternatively, I could frame blogging as a practice or training activity. And I could imagine a larger project like writing a book, creating a course, or delivering a workshop as a performance activity.

The reality is that I use both frames and often flip between them. Sometimes I see blogging as a way to beta-test ideas. Other times I see it as a core activity for delivering value to people. The framing is flexible. But what isn’t so flexible is that some form of training and practice is necessary. Whichever frame I use, training and practice must be an essential part of it.

Alternatively, suppose you view your work as 100% performance time. There is no practice and training while you’re on the clock. How does that framing sit with you? Does it suggest that if you want to improve, you have to devote some of your personal unpaid time to training and skill-building? I think that’s exactly what it suggests.

While you do get some performance gains from training, it’s best not to confuse the two. Training gives you more coverage of different skills than performance alone ever will. You may practice situations in training that you’ll rarely experience on the performance side, yet it’s critical to have those skills when they’re needed. With training you can also break down the fundamental skills and work on them more thoroughly than you can on the performance side.

Imagine that 90% (or more) of your work time is just practice and training, and 10% (or less) is real performance time. If you use this lens, which activities would you put on each side?

What are your most critical skills that provide the most value? What would happen if you devoted the other 90% of your work time to honing and training up those skills to an even higher level?

Suppose you create and publish videos as your main work product. All the value you provide is in your published videos. Now suppose you spent 90% of your work time just training and practicing your video skills – but not publishing any of that work. Do you think that would impact what you’re able to deliver with the other 10%?

The 90-10 ratios are arbitrary by the way. You could use 80-20, 50-50, or anything else that appeals to you. What ratios make you reconsider your approach to work? I like the extreme of 90-10 thinking because it gets me closer to the mindset of a pro athlete who has to invest an extraordinary amount of training and practice time for a small amount of performance time. In reality their ratio is likely to be even more extreme than 90-10, especially if you consider Olympic athletes who may train years for a single performance (which in some cases may be measured in seconds).

Play around with this frame. You don’t have to use it exclusively, but it can be an interesting way to think about work and productivity. What if you approached your work like a pro athlete whereby the vast majority of your work time was treated as training and practice for a small but important slice of critical performance time? Could this (or something close to it) be a better model than seeing your work at 100% performance time?

Almost all of the articles I’ve posted this year – or ever, actually – were written on the same day they were published. It’s been my blogging style for the past 16 years to write and edit posts in a single writing session and then to publish them when they’re complete.

This year is unusual because it’s the first year that I’ve made a commitment to publish a new post every day of the year, so up until this point, I’ve been writing every day of the year. Very occasionally I’ve written two posts in one day, but nearly all of my posts were published on the same day I wrote them.

Last week I decided to do something different. On Tuesday, August 4th, I opted to try batch blogging – basically to spend my whole workday writing and editing blog articles and queuing them up to be published on subsequent days.

I shunned this approach in previous years because I always felt that when an article is done, I should share it immediately. Why make people wait?

With this year’s daily blogging, however, I see this differently. I don’t think people need (or want) multiple articles in a single day. I’m already writing and publishing faster than some people are able to keep up with the reading. So a faster rate of publication seems like overkill.

I also like that if I write multiple posts in a day, I can take some days off from blogging. I don’t necessarily need to do that, but I’m curious how it will affect me. As a side note, somehow I picked the best possible year for this daily commitment – gotta love the power of trusting intuitive signals.

I’d always intended to test batch blogging sometime during this year, which is why I framed my daily blogging commitment as daily publishing, not daily writing. After doing 7+ months so far, continuing to blog every day for another 5 months seems pretty easy and straightforward – maybe a bit too easy – so I’d like to play with different approaches to see how they suit me.

I think batch creation is easier (and faster) to do with videos or audios, but I’m pretty fast at writing, so I felt I could make it work. I could make this easier by favoring shorter posts, but generally I like to let the content itself dictate the length. Writing flows through me like a river, and I find it best not to try to control it too tightly.

To speed things along, I brainstormed enough ideas for 8 new articles the day before my batch blogging day, so on the actual writing day I could just focus on writing articles instead of coming up with topics. I also jotted down a few keywords or quick ideas for each article, like 20-50 words to help me frame and capture each idea.

Additionally, I posted about this experiment in the CGC member forums and invited members to share additional ideas for new articles. I’m easily able to come up with new ideas on my own, but I figured that more abundance of ideas is better. I figured that it would be easier to do batch blogging if I could select ideas from a pool of 20 or 30 rather than a pool of 8. This gives me more flexibility in picking topics to match my inspiration and energy levels. Most of the time it felt like the next article choose me rather than vice versa. After finishing one article, I’d look back at the ideas list, and I’d pick up a clear signal to write a certain piece next.

My initial goal was to write 5 posts in a day. I thought that was conservative and that I’d likely be able to do more. This is more than I’ve ever written in a day though, so in that sense the bar was high, but I also felt that it should be achievable.

This batch blogging day was an off-day for exercise, so I got an early start. I wonder if it would be have better if I did my usual 5-mile run to start the day though.

I made a large green smoothie, cleared out a few minor tasks first, and wrote the first article of 1022 words (Is It Unethical to Have Pets?) while sipping the smoothie. I published it immediately since that was the post for that day.

Next I wrote a second article of 1219 words (Pre-Consent in Relationships) and queued it for publishing the next day.

I took a break to have more food (some grain-free cereal with fresh strawberries), and then I wrote a longer piece on entrepreneurship called Your Giant Pumpkin (2163 words).

I finished that one around 12:30pm and queued it for publishing.

I took a longer break for lunch with Rachelle and went back to writing around 2:30pm.

Next I wrote Fragile Habits (1055 words), took a short break, and wrote Your #1 Priority May Lead You Astray (1101 words).

By this time I was getting a bit bleary-eyed, so I took another break and chatted with Rachelle for a bit. I was pretty happy with 5 posts done since that was my goal.

I felt it would be nice to wrap up the day with an infrared sauna session, so I switched it on to heat it up. It takes about 45 minutes to heat up to 145º F. I figured that I could write at least one more post, maybe two short ones, while the sauna was heating, so I challenged myself to write some more.

I wrote Ass-Kicking Frames during that time. It’s only 608 words, but it took extra time to brainstorm and look up relevant movie quotes for it. I didn’t mind the extra time it took since I really enjoyed writing that piece – it was my favorite one of the day, probably because it was the most playful.

I finished around 6pm with six posts written, edited, and queued for publishing – 7168 words of new material.

That Tuesday writing marathon created enough articles to cover daily blogging through the following Sunday, with all of the posts queued to be automatically published in the morning of each day.

That meant I wouldn’t have to blog again till the following Monday (which is actually today, the day that this post is published).

I found the challenge lively, stimulating, and fun. It gave me a nice sense of accomplishment too. I’ve never written that many posts in a day before, so now I can say that my new record is writing six posts in one day.

The sauna session afterwards was really nice as well – a relaxing way to transition out of the blogging marathon.

At the end of the day, my brain was mush though. I could barely speak intelligibly when talking with Rachelle while we made dinner together that night. I tripped on my words a few times, as if trying to say tongue twisters. It felt like my language circuits were pretty fried.

Quite often when doing a long work session, I don’t feel the fatigue while I’m working, but I really feel it when I stop or take breaks. I felt the fatigue most strongly after writing. While writing I felt great.

I think that with more practice (or shorter articles), I could do more posts in a day. All but one of these were over 1000 words, and one was over 2000 words. I could mix in some shorter posts around 500 words.

I imagine that blogging daily for 7+ months made this easier since it keeps me warmed up for writing, but I also think I could have done this in prior years. What really helped was to make the commitment to give it a real test. I also think that generating article ideas the day before made it significantly easier. In the past I casually pondered batch blogging but never really committed myself to testing it seriously. This time I cleared my plate for the day and committed myself to write as much as I could before dinner time.

I could have written more if I did more writing after dinner, but my intention wasn’t to completely exhaust myself. I wanted to containerize it within a workday that ended before dinner. I wrote everything within a span of 12 hours but with ample breaks; that was sufficient for a decent personal proof of concept test.

I also did some other tasks along the way, including interacting in the CGC forums, handling some emails, and resolving a minor tech issue on the website, so technically the day wasn’t fully cleared, but I had enough space to make writing my primary focus for the day.

I think with some practice I could get up to doing 8-10 posts in one day. But I’d love to see if I can sustainably write 7 posts in one day since that would cover a week. Then I could dedicate one day a week to blogging and batch write all my posts. That would give me 6 days off from blogging every week. I’m curious how that change in workflow would turn out.

I also wonder if I continue to practice this way, will my writing circuits build more endurance, so I don’t feel as fatigued afterwards?

I actually wrote this post the day after that batch blogging day, in the morning on Wednesday, August 5th. I wanted to write one more post to cover Monday the 10th, so if I do another batch blogging day, I can do it on Tuesday the 11th. That’s because Monday wouldn’t be suitable since we have a CGC coaching call that day. I want my batch blogging days to be free of appointments, so I can stick with writing and not have to switch modes.

I do feel that my writing circuits are a bit off this morning. I feel very warmed up from yesterday’s marathon of writing, so in one sense the words are flowing easily. But I can also tell that some parts of my brain feel foggy and overworked and could use more rest and recovery. I feel like my eyes could use a break from staring at the screen too. I don’t feel fatigued per se. It just seems like some parts of my brain are still offline, as if I can’t get my mind to think properly in certain directions. I imagine that many people who’ve done very mono-focused work sessions can relate to this sensation.

Anyway… I consider this experiment an interesting success, so I’m going to lean into it further and see how well it goes.

You can be the judge, but I don’t feel that batch blogging negatively affected my writing. Writing this way is extra stimulating, fun, and challenging, so I feel this approach may inject some extra positives.

Writing one post a day feels a bit underwhelming by comparison – way too easy. I can be a bit of a stimulation junkie when it comes to creative work, so I like the freshness of this approach. I like that this could be an interesting way to push myself again, especially in terms of writing endurance.

I see batch blogging as an interesting tool to add to my creative toolbox. I can use it when I want, and I can also write individual posts outside of batch blogging sessions when I feel inspired to do so.

My daily blogging commitment is just for 2020, not something I intend to continue in future years. But I like the potential for batch blogging in future years since I may be able to write a month’s worth of articles in a day… or perhaps a calendar quarter’s worth of articles in a few days. That could create some interesting workflow rhythms since it would free up more space for creative projects in the space between. I could potentially go a few months at a stretch without attending to blogging while still providing the value that people like.

I supposed you could say that this article (2010 words) was part of the same batch blogging session, just carried into the next day. In that case the session amounts to 7 articles (9178 words).