Life can be rocky, and backlogs can pile up. But there are strategies to manage high workloads, reduce mental load, and keep customers happy.

Speed matters. Most people appreciate quick reactions to emails, returning missed calls, or interactive discussions with immediate feedback.

But what about executing quickly, not just communicating quickly? I often hear people complaining about their backlogs, their inability to catch up and keep up, and how crazy much they have to do.

Yes, at times, life can be rocky, and backlogs can pile up. However, there are strategies to manage high workloads without feeling overwhelmed all the time. Here are three questions you should ask yourself regularly.

1. Discussion Time vs. Resolution Time

Most people love to discuss and debate everything and anything. Sometimes, a healthy debate is needed to find the best solution. But sometimes, you’re better off ending the discussions and starting execution.

If you have too much work on your desk, identify those tasks that can be done in less time than you spend discussing them.

Simple? Yes.

The best example is household work. My kids sometimes spend endless time and energy complaining about having to clean up the kitchen or tidying up their rooms. Their complaining usually takes five times longer than the completion of these tasks.

In business life, it’s the same with admin. Admin is a necessary evil, but don’t waste additional time on admin tasks by constantly talking and complaining about them. Most admin tasks take less time to complete than people spend talking about those tasks.

2. Mental Load vs. Resolution Time

Do you ever feel your mind is about to explode because there are so many unfinished tasks on your mind?

Very often, this feeling is self-inflicted. Unfinished tasks don’t just pile up in your email inbox, but they also drain mental energy. If you wake up knowing that you have a lot of unfinished small tasks, you lose energy and focus for the important stuff on today’s agenda before your day even starts.

Here is an example. I serve as a volunteer in an officers’ association, and an elderly member wrote to me saying that the links in dark yellow on our website were not very legible for his old eyes. He politely requested the link color to be changed to a different color.

It took me five clicks in the admin panel of our website to rectify this. I immediately completed this request and informed the guy that the problem had been fixed. The result? A freed-up mind on my side, and a happy and grateful member on the other side.

3. Deferred Problems Are Amplified Problems

So far, we’ve been talking about trivial tasks in this article. Let’s turn to more complex tasks now and use software development as an example — my home turf as the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.

Sometimes, our customers request new features or feature improvements in our software. That’s great, because it makes our product better and helps our customers create more value from our software.

And even more than for trivial tasks, speed matters when discussing feature improvements. If you wait too long to implement feature improvements, your customers might become dissatisfied and start to look for alternatives. A deferred problem (feature implementation) is an amplified problem (customer churn). It’s that simple.

Conclusion

Life is full of unforeseen tasks that pop up with no advance warning and need your quick reaction. If you allow yourself to be controlled by foreseeable tasks, you’re making your life needlessly miserable.

The simple formula is this: Be proactive on all foreseeable tasks (including admin and petty work), and you will always have the capacity to react to unforeseeable things unfolding in the messy reality.