Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Setting Priorities in a Business

Something I need to constantly remind myself about is prioritization. There's only one of me, and there's way more things that need to be done than I have time for. One has to prioritize. You're not choosing between things that are right and things that are wrong; you're optimizing to get the most out of your time.

Here's what I'd consider a rough priority list, not necessarily in any order:

- Improve the Mud Connector banner ad to drive more traffic
- Improve the main AA pages - add a couple of images, some player quotes
- Release another client version with true non-mudder additions
- Improve level 5-29 experience, especially in groups

Some of these are easier than others, but of all four of these, I note that none of them are on my board. Not that the things on my board aren't important, but somehow, these irritating bottlenecks have managed to avoid being written there.

How exactly do the four most important bottlenecks not get placed on the todo list? There are multiple reasons; first and foremost, these bottlenecks are continuous, persistent things. They almost always require improvement, and focusing on them exclusively would mean nothing else gets done.

It could also be that they are too obvious - of course that needs to be done! Or it could simply be that I lack the incentive to work on them. I find incentive to be in short supply these days.

With the influx of newbies from the Mud Connector and other sites, things appear to be going reasonably well. But as I've told others, the Mud Connector is a limited market that will saturate in just a few short years, if not sooner. We have to work on other things as well.

3 comments:

Dennis Towne said...

Update - I made a first pass of updates to the main page, hopefully streamlining and cleaning up the new player guide.

Druid said...

Interesting blog

Dennis Towne said...

Another quick update:

- The main AA pages have been improved again, but adding the client screenshot appeared to make things worse, not better. I may try to rerun it later with a different image. Likely, the client simply looks too cheezy and it turns people off.

- I did some work on the level 5-29 stuff, to improve group exp and hopefully make things more fun at that level. I'll have to revisit the stats in a month or so after everything has stabilized.