Where Club Secretaries Actually Lose Ten Hours a Week

Ask a club secretary what the role involves and you'll hear about committee work, membership, keeping the club on an even keel. Ask their phone and you get a different answer. The phone says the job is messages: dozens of them a week, most needing thirty seconds of thought and five minutes of handling.

The ten hours in the title is not a survey finding — it's a challenge. Log one week. Write down every club message you deal with and what it actually asked of you. Secretaries who try this tend to find the total uncomfortable, and the breakdown worse.

A week in messages, honestly logged

Monday evening: two booking requests and an “is the RIB free on Saturday morning?” Tuesday: a cancellation, which means remembering who asked last week if anything was coming free, then messaging them, then waiting. Wednesday: a member wants to know whether Thursday looks too windy to bother. Thursday: someone can't remember if they booked the morning or the afternoon slot. Friday: three more booking requests, one clash, one polite dispute about who asked first. And under all of it, the fuel money from last month, still not fully in.

None of these tasks is difficult. That is the trap. Each takes two minutes to read and five to resolve, and each pulls you out of whatever you were doing. Two dozen of those is a lost evening. Add the clash mediation and the chasing and you reach ten hours before you've done anything a committee would recognise as secretary work.

Routing versus judgement

The role splits into two kinds of work. Judgement work needs a human who knows the club: should we suspend the member who no-shows every third booking? Is that engine fault bad enough to pull the boat before the weekend? Do we let the newest member take the fast boat out on a spring tide?

Routing work is everything else — moving a request from one place to another. A booking request routed into the diary. A cancellation routed to whoever wanted the slot. A weather question routed to the same forecast the member could have read. A fuel figure routed from a wheelhouse notebook to an email to a bank reference.

Judgement is why the role exists. Routing is what the role has quietly become. And routing is precisely the work software should absorb, because there is no judgement in it at all.

The five questions that fill the inbox

Read a month of club messages and most of them reduce to five questions:

1. Is the boat free on Saturday?
2. Can you book me in?
3. Can I cancel Thursday?
4. What's the weather going to do?
5. How much do I owe for fuel?

Each is only a question because the member can't see the answer for themselves. A live booking calendar kills the first two: the member checks, books, and gets a confirmation without anyone lifting a finger at the club end. Self-serve cancellation with a notice period handles the third — and the notice period matters, because the point isn't just less admin, it's that a freed slot reaches the waiting list while someone can still use it. A dashboard showing wind, temperature and tide times for the booking date deals with the fourth. The fifth deserves its own section.

Fuel money: the monthly chase

Fuel is the worst offender because it compounds. Litres jotted in a notebook, or texted to the secretary, or remembered wrongly. A spreadsheet updated in batches. A month-end email listing who owes what, followed by the awkward second email to the four members who missed the first. Nobody is dodging; they've simply been asked to pay a number no one sent them properly.

The alternative is to log litres and cost against the booking itself, while it's fresh, then let month-end become a filter for unbilled sessions and one itemised statement per member. Fleet software like Nauticore does exactly this, and puts the same statement inside the member's own app — at which point “how much do I owe?” stops being a message anyone needs to send.

What's left is the actual job

Strip out the routing and what remains is the work people put their hands up for at the AGM. The training programme. The winter refit plan. Whether the club can stretch to a fourth boat. The judgement call on the member who keeps pushing their luck. Time on the water, even, which is presumably why anyone joined.

Nobody volunteered to be a switchboard. So judge any club system by one measure above the feature list: the quiet. If the Sunday-evening phone stops ringing, it's working. If the secretary is still the only person who knows whether the RIB is free, it isn't.