Seth's Blog : The overflowing outbox

The overflowing outbox

Deadlines are vitamins for creativity.

If you've got too much in progress, too much of a buffer, too many items ready to go, it's easy to slip back to complacency. Without the feeling of imminent, it's easier to hide.

If you're the kind of person that needs a crisis to move forward, feel free to invent one. Take the good ideas that aren't going anywhere and delete them, give them away, hand them off to your team.

An empty outbox is a mother of invention.

[The flipside: Maybe you don't need invention. Maybe what you need is market traction, completion or more trust. Maybe you need to build an asset, firm up a foundation and create real value for your customers. It could be that one reason your outbox is so full is that you're still in the habit of inventing. It turns out that 99% of the value our teams create happens after we've invented something.] The Dip is real.