I draw a parallel between work intake and the postal system, showing that every task should be treated like a package: captured, tagged, routed, tracked, and delivered with precision. By unifying intake and applying disciplined tagging, teams eliminate ambiguity and misrouting. Proper routing ensures tasks land where they belong, while real-time tracking offers transparency and confidence. Exception handling becomes deliberate rather than reactive. I emphasize that adopting this structured approach transforms chaotic work streams into scalable, reliable systems that fuel organizational execution and growth.
Every organization is flooded with work from all directions — emails, chats, meetings, calls, notes, customer requests, system alerts, vendor inquiries. The work arrives unstructured, often fragmented, and without clear ownership. In most companies, this intake becomes a messy pile: spreadsheets, shared docs, disconnected lists, or simply forgotten conversations. The result is entirely predictable: lost work, misrouted assignments, and costly rework.
But there’s a better way to think about it. The solution is not more lists, meetings, or reminders — it’s to change how we think about the very nature of work intake itself. The best model we can borrow comes from an unlikely but familiar place: the post office.
At its core, a postal system is nothing more than a highly disciplined work intake and delivery network. Every envelope or package that enters the system follows a simple, repeatable sequence:
First, unified intake. Whether you drop it in a mailbox, bring it to a counter, or schedule a pickup, every package flows into a single system. The source doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it enters the system. For work intake, the same rule applies: every task, request, or deliverable — regardless of where it originates — must be captured into a central Work Queue. Meetings, Slack messages, emails, hallway conversations — all of it. No exceptions.
Next, tagging and qualification. The postal service reads the address, scans barcodes, validates postage, and assigns routing instructions. Work needs the same. Every task must be tagged with its type, owner, priority, department, and dependencies. Until properly tagged, a work item cannot move downstream. The mistake most organizations make is processing untagged work — this creates ambiguity, misrouting, and missed expectations.
Then comes routing. The postal system knows exactly where to send every package: local distribution centers, regional hubs, or international gateways. Inside the organization, once a task is tagged, it should automatically route to the right downstream queue: Customer Support Queue, Activity Queue, Priority Queue, or Project Queue. Work should flow to the place best suited for its nature and urgency.
Now, delivery. Eventually, a postal carrier puts the package on the doorstep. Inside the company, this is where individuals or teams receive and execute the work assigned to them. Their job is not to figure out where the work came from or whether it’s valid — that was handled upstream. Their job is simply to deliver.
At every step, tracking and visibility are critical. Every package has a tracking number, visible to both sender and receiver, which shows where it is at any given moment. Tasks should have the same: unique identifiers that allow leadership to track progress, monitor workloads, and surface bottlenecks in real time. This creates confidence, reduces duplication, and eliminates the endless “where do we stand on this?” conversations.
Finally, exception handling. The postal system has processes for returns, undeliverable mail, and damaged shipments. So should work. Tasks that are unclear, incomplete, or misrouted need a simple escalation path — not buried Slack threads or ambiguous “next steps” in meetings.
The lesson is simple: every task is a package. Unitize the work, tag it properly, route it intelligently, track it relentlessly, and deliver it cleanly. The source of work doesn’t matter. The volume doesn’t matter. The system holds.
The post office handles billions of items per year with extraordinary reliability — because the model is sound. Organizations should adopt the same discipline for work intake. Not only does it prevent chaos, it builds a system that can scale indefinitely, absorb growth, and operate with remarkable precision.
In today’s complex work environments, the ability to receive, organize, and distribute work efficiently is no longer optional — it’s the foundation of organizational execution.
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