13 tips on how to stay decentralized without burning out

Published in

UFOstart

6 min readApr 29, 2022

If you have ever done any work for blockchain, you know know that one thing.

You should have a close relationship, almost personal, with all your stakeholders. But also it is very easy to burn out if you try to do everything on your own. So here comes a question — how do you regain a healthy balance?

In this article, we will provide a list of aspects you should reflect on regularly in your blockchain business. It will help you develop the right processes and habits needed to successfully achieve your long-term business goals.

After reading this article you should feel inspired to:

Improve your process creation skills in the dynamic blockchain industry.
Automate your decentralized business effectively.
Run a community of members aware of the mission, vision, and values.

To add the cherry on top, I will be using what I have discussed with our Marketing Manager, Basti. His UFO Flightschool post was an inspiration to create this article. You can check it out here on our Instagram.

👉Process

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. — W. Edwards Deming

In this post, a process is a series of business actions or steps taken to achieve a particular goal.

Why the power of process creation should be important for your business?

We are in the moment of exploration in blockchain but that does not mean that we should let things be all over the place, without any clear direction. Quite the opposite — on the way so many new opportunities will be popping up that you might end up losing your focus. Knowing your process beforehand will help you remain flexible and achieve your goal according to the current situation.

Here are the tips that will help you build and readjust the process when necessary to successfully achieve your goals.

Reflect on your work regularly. Pick an idea. Readjust it. Implement it. Learn from it. Knowing where you stand will help you move further.
Save energy and provide space for the creative part of your work. Building a process means having awareness of how to effectively develop every business activity. A proper process does not obsess over structures but understands key elements needed to achieve the desired outcome. Therefore, it is necessary to provide a space for your team where you can let go of the structures and let the imagination blossom alongside your regular business activities.
Look for inspiration in other organizations, but keep your flow adequate to your business. Each business is different and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, searching for inspiration can result in unconventional solutions, that have nothing to do with brainlessly following the mass. This will also help you understand better, what is and what is not needed for your business.
Try out the scrum method. Especially if you are at the beginning of starting a project, but already settled down with the strategy. This will save you a lot of time from obstacles that block your progress. It will help you teach your team how to work independently. This technique requires a certain level of dedication in the beginning, but in my opinion, is very effective in the long run.

👉Automation & Data

It is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools should be used in the right way. — Wallace D. Wattles

In this post, automation is defined as a technique of making a business process operate automatically.

Why does knowing how to implement automation may save your life?

This also refers to the previous part, where we pointed out that you should save as much time and energy as you can for creative work. Finding out which elements of your work can be automated or documented will allow you to focus on the bigger ideas and achieve your strategic goals.

Here are a few things you should reflect on when automating your business activities.

When asking yourself, what exactly should be done by machines, point out all the things that you can forget about. This could be something simple such as databases or automatic email replies. However, in blockchain, you can take it to the next level. You can build a community with the help of bots, that can stay on track with member activities and keep them under control.
Run through your Notion & Discord regularly to check for outdated information that may cause misinformation. This may sound obvious but very often we procrastinate with monotonous tasks. However, if you are running a big community, it is on your shoulders to make sure the data is correct and clear. Otherwise, your members will spread misinformation which will backlash your business.
Before introducing a new feature to your community, outline the process and imagine how you would like to have it introduced to you. Which elements do you think need more explanation? What questions are going to be asked by the members? All these things will help you gain the trust and loyalty of your community members.
Check manually before you automate anything. Let’s say you introduce a new bot on your Discord that asks for verification. Before you make it go live, create a mock Discord server where you can use it as a playground for testing new features.

👉Human Input

You manage things; you lead people. — Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper

In this post, human input is an action that is done manually with a conscious intention of an individual to achieve a specific outcome or result.

Why should you learn how to lead people in decentralized communities?

In decentralized organizations, motivated people who know what needs to be achieved are like a rare diamond. Knowing how to create an independent community will take a lot of pressure off your shoulders and will build a self-running ecosystem of well-informed members.

Here are practical tips that will save you a lot of time keeping your community on track with the workload.

In a perfect world, everything is run by humans. We do not live in such a world but we should aim at providing the minimum necessary supervision of a human when using tools. Technological improvement can never be better than human interaction.
Learn how to incentivize people. If people believe in your business it will not be any more difficult to motivate them to participate in the project. Prioritize sharing your vision with the community, exciting them about the progress, and celebrating every small success.
Give people the means to personalize the amount of dedication they want to deliver. Provide them with member roles, list all your bounties, and keep track of their well-being. It is better to have realistic expectations of your community rather than to burn it out.
Keep your community informed. Make sure that everyone, or at least as many people as possible in your organization knows where to go, what the goal is, and what is the vision. This could be done in a form of a manifesto or regular community meetings where you talk about the big vision of the organization and small tasks that will help you achieve it.
Be careful to whom you grant your permission. It is easy to lose track of it when you want to involve a lot of members in your work. But in such a dynamic space people come and go and it is easy to forget about how many people can access channels or data no longer relevant to them. It will prevent your business additionally from hacker attacks.

This is all the advice that we came up with during my brainstorming with Basti. But that is not the end.

We had quite a spontaneous realization. Our tool is the perfect solution for keeping your business automatized yet with the human touch. Very often you have to spend tremendous amounts of time with multiple marketing advisors to find the right solution for your business and then still come up with the next solutions. In our tool, you get the best of both worlds. The creative process is done by humans and the structuring is done by a machine.

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