One thing I find that helps is, if you need a storage yard near a bazaar for a housing area to provide that housing area with needed goods, limit that storage area in what it can recieve. For example, I find that if I put a SY near a housing block that the bazaar ladies can buy from, and I limit it to 1/4 pottery, 1/4 linen, 1/4 beer and 1/4 papyrus, all the needs of that housing block get met (except luxury goods, which are only needed if you need to go to Manor type houses), and it only takes 800 of each good. Once that SY has 800 of that type, the traders (or delivery men if you produce it yourself and not import) will go on to the next SY. This way, if you have, say, 6 housing blocks and need to import pottery, then you can set your import to maintain 4800 and each of your feeder SYs will eventually get filled. The ones closest to the kingdom road will fill first, but eventually they will all get filled.
By doing this, I can usually keep a high level of population well supplied with everything they need and not have to over produce much. If you are still producing more than you need and want to export, then set your export to export when surplus is more than 800 x # of housing blocks and have some SYs set up far away from everything else to hold that surplus.
In other words, if you have 6 housing blocks and each housing block has a SY to feed the bazaar, then set your pottery to export when surplus exceeds 4800 and make sure you have a SY farther away from your pottery makers than your housing blocks.