Input, Output, Outcome
🌱 This post is in the growth phase. It may still be useful as it grows up.
Have you been on a team that does a lot of goal-setting but very litting goal-achieving?
Of course you have.
In my experience it’s because folks don’t know the difference between outcomes and outputs.
If you understand this difference, it will transform the way you make actionable plans from your goals and set you up for clear communication in your team
Input
Inputs are what goes in:
- Read 12 books
- Avoid added sugar
- Limit social media to 1 hour per day
Input goals are great for learning and safeguarding output goals.
Goals here are a moat around your output goals.
Output
Outputs are the creative act.
They’re where you digest everything you know into something new.
Outputs can be incredibly simple.
- Post one tweet a day
- Update my LinkedIn with one work success every month
They can be big.
- Produce a YouTube video every week
- Publish a course every month
I really like goals that tie into an input.
- Share one book report a month with my newsletter
This type of output dictates your inputs.
This style of output has become popular as reaction content.
Everyone is reading the same content (articles, videos, books, movies) but sumarization and curation are still in fairly short supply.
Outcome
Outcomes are your “big harry audacious goals”.
But from a planning perspective, they don’t mean anything.
Goals are, at best, a retrospective tool.
They’re a way to acknowledge how far you’ve come.
Because it’s so easy to overlook once you’ve become proficient in focusing on outcomes.
Important but only in the rear view.
Driving it home
For me, outputs are enough.
I want to be trustworthy with my own life and being a person who does what I say is enough.
But my goal this year is to get better about setting outcomes and using those to decide my outputs.
Right now, I’m far too scattered.
And I theorize that this might be a second-order value to goals.