Does work constantly get thrown at you, and yet you’re also expected to produce deep thinking work? Today’s blog hopes to explore solutions of how to balance these two things for you and your team.
I was talking about work recently with a friend who is also in a management position, though not in game development and she manages a lot more people than me. As work conversations go, the feeling of being overwhelmed came up, having way too much to do and not enough time to do it.
Everything was always being thrown at her, and she was being asked to put out fire upon fire every day while also being expected to output (create) new things like programs and policies, reach out to potential partners, and improve the project management system. She was forced to be responsive and responsive only, never proactive or productive.
The Balance of Input/Output Work
Whether you’re in a leadership position or not, you may feel the need to balance the input coming in (emails, requests, meetings, fires to put out) and the output (creation of work plans, strategizing, new initiatives, etc).
The drawing below shows a day where you’d spend approximately half the time in input mode, and half the time in output mode. The amount of work you do total in either department would be the area under the curve (those shaded areas). In this case, it shows input work first thing in the morning, then some output work, back to input, and output before the work day is finished.
If you’re like my friend, however, your situation might look more like this:
This is obviously not a very good way to get output work done.
So what is a good way to get a nice balance of input to output work done? The “right” input/output graph depends on the specific person, the role, the field of work, and the team dynamic. Especially if you manage people, it’s worth thinking about because knowing what this graph looks like for each member of your team will help you plan meetings, work collaboratively, ensure focus time for your team members, and generally help you to manage people.
As the conversation continued we realized that there are at least two things we have to consider when thinking about input and output style work.
- The total quantity of input vs output work
- The timing and cadence of the input vs output work
1. The total quantity of input vs output work
As I mentioned, the quantity of input vs output will depend on the person, role, etc. Someone who is in a job where they produce things—an artist making art assets, a programmer writing code—should have a lot more output than input. Someone who is working a customer service job on the other hand would have almost only input in the form of requests coming at them.
2. The cadence and timing of input vs output work
Cadence: If a period of output work is too short—that is, the person is being interrupted with incoming communications or requests while trying to do output work, they won’t be able to stay focused on their task and they’re likely to perform much, much slower. Beyond that, if you (like me) believe that being in a flow state while doing output work is key to both productivity and to motivation/satisfaction at work, then having constant blips of input could be disastrous to the person and their work.
Timing: It’s important to think about when an individual is doing a certain type of work. Some people will focus super well first thing in the morning, so you don’t want to be interrupting their flow then. If two people work well late at night, you might have them do more collarborative work in the mornings. If you haven’t heard of chronotypes, I’d suggest checking them out. If your team’s input vs output work is always misaligned, collaboration will be difficult and flow will be nearly impossible.
How We Apply This at Clever Endeavour
At our studio, I’ve been trying to set a schedule where the mornings are reserved for focus (output) time and the afternoon is open discussion and collaboration (input). It’s not always perfect because different people on the team have different schedules, so sometimes we have some design-related meetings earlier in the day, sometimes folks are away at different times during the day, etc. But generally we aim for this and because we’re a small team that communicates often, we know when we’ll have to make exceptions to the plan.
Our daily check-in, weekly meeting, and any other internal or external meetings are done in the afternoon where possible (in some cases my afternoon is someone’s midnight across the world, so we have to call earlier).
For me personally, this focus time in the morning allows me to get into a flow state whether I’m working on design, HR initiatives, or more CEO-related thinking and planning work. In the afternoon, I’m doing small tasks that are too short to get into flow anyway, so I include external calls, 1 on 1 meetings, email cleanup, and any other things that would disrupt flow into the afternoon.
The hypothesis I’ve been working with, which seems to be going well so far, is that artists and programmers don’t want to be bothered, and they will perform better and feel better about their work if allowd to get into flow. Designers will have more input time but still need to be left with large blocks of time undisturbed to get into output mode. Managers and marketing folks will have even more input time, but still need some blocks of time to focus because they’re also being asked to come up with creative and well thought-out plans, like my friend mentioned above.
The important thing, in my opinion, is knowing where people want these blocks of work and making sure everyone is both aligned and knows when other people’s blocks of work are happening within a team.
Questions For You
- How much input/output should each person on your team have?
- Have you thought about how to align those times to maximize flow and maximize productivity?
- Are you often interrupting your team with inputs when they should be in output mode? (this is a common one!)
I hope these questions and this blog have given you something to think about either for your own work or for the work of the people you manage. I’d love to hear about it if you make changes that you find beneficial.
🙂
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