Taking care of inbound and outbound
How you manage inbound and outbound flow determines your ability to effectively create and ship work, and to help others.
Inbound flow is the rate you are given work or sign up for work.
Outbound flow is the rate you are able to ship work.
Outbound can be optimized by identifying more efficient ways to produce (e.g. pre-built sales reports, photoshop workflows, newsletter templates, etc), but even with the highest level of optimization it remains true that inbound flow at a certain rate will invariably reduce your outbound flow — you end up with too much to do and not enough time to do it.
If excessive inbound becomes a limiting factor, here are a couple of ways to manage it:
- Say ‘no’ because you realize that your ability to ship other work to those who need it depends on it.
- Identify the mechanisms driving up inbound flow and directly address them (perhaps certain inbound requests, with a little bit of effort, can be automated or redistributed).
It may be easy to say yes to everything because the growing backlog of work only becomes obvious later, but it’s not sustainable. Optimizing inbound and outbound flow as an individual, a team, and an organization is about ensuring that you are doing right by yourself, your team, and the people you aim to serve.
