# Too much work? Why the volume is rarely the real problem [Home](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en) › [Study](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study) › [Articles](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/study/articles) author: [Axel Jedlitschka](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/about) published: 2026-10-08 updated: 2026-10-08 language: en reading time: 5 min topic: Personal source booklet: [Where the Day Went](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/personal-order-time) The volume is not what sinks you. What sinks you is the things that were handled badly, and the extra work they create. When it feels like you have too much work, the amount is almost never what is actually wrong. According to the source, what knocks you off course is items that were handled badly, and the extra work they keep creating without you noticing. ## The day that ends with nothing moved forward You know the feeling. The day is over and you honestly can't say what you got done. You weren't idle. You started early, answered, ran around, put out fires, went back to things. Then in the evening someone asks what moved forward, and the answer comes out in pieces, while this morning's list looks exactly the same. The usual advice for this is about your calendar. Plan better, block out hours, set priorities. It doesn't work, and the reason is simple. All of it deals with how much time you have, not with what is eating that time. You can build a perfect calendar and still lose it to things that never should have happened. ## The problem is the pattern, not the amount The source opens with a picture. The little notes, messages and requests that reach you are what keep you informed and stretch how far you can reach. In the same breath, they can turn into a blizzard that blows you right off your post. Its explanation: there is power in those lines. **Lines** here are the channels things travel to you and from you through: phone, messaging apps, email, people walking into the room. For that power to work for you, the lines need a neat pattern. Without one, the power comes back at you. So the very same stream is what drives the business, and also what can bury you. **What decides it is not how much, but how it is ordered.** Suppose a heating and cooling installer gets enquiries through four different channels. The total isn't even large. What wears him down is that no enquiry ever closes out in a single place, so he never sees all of them together. Now the other way around. The same installer makes every enquiry land in one place. Exactly the same volume, and all of a sudden he can see the bottom of the pile. ## What really knocks you off course Here is the sentence the whole booklet rests on. What takes you, and your business, off track is mishandled items. You can cope with enormous amounts of work. It is the badly handled pieces that make those amounts look like a lost cause. A **mishandled item** is a task whose handling didn't close it, but created another task instead: one more call, one more fix, one more round of questions. The source puts it in six words: “The volume is not at fault.” That isn't meant as comfort. It's a claim you can test. If volume were the problem, reducing volume would fix it. Yet anyone who has turned work away to clear their head knows what really happens: there is less work, and the mess is still there. Suppose a removals company owner trims his client list hard so he can breathe. Two months later he is just as swamped as before, only now with less income. He dealt with the amount, and the problem was never there. Then comes the uncomfortable part. The source says people often create mishandlings without realizing it. Nobody else is doing this to you. And if you don't keep watch over your own lines, you can bury your whole business in snow. ## Why a business like this looks frantically busy The source does not soften its picture of a manager who doesn't route what comes in and doesn't keep a constant watch over his lines. He goes under fast, loses his grip on the job, feels overwhelmed and works himself to death. After that, everything around him comes apart too. That order explains something almost every small-business owner has seen. When you're underwater, the quality of everybody else's work drops as well, and you can't figure out why. They learn from you. Once you stop answering customers on time, it doesn't take long before your employee stops too, because there is nobody to learn a different way from. Then comes the sharpest description of all. Developed traffic, the source says, “destroys any real production in an org while making the org seem frantically busy.” **Developed traffic** is any work that never needed to happen at all: a second and third call to clarify, a repeat trip to the same job, a fix to a fix. Not the usual, necessary kind of traffic, but the unusual, unnecessary kind. And the words that matter are frantically busy. Not lazy, not inefficient. Busy. That's how it looks from outside, and that's how it feels from inside. Everyone puts in ten-hour days, and nothing moves. ## What the booklet has on this The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: the split, and the test. After them comes a self-check, and from there the booklet gives a name to each of the things that eat your day. If your days are full and nothing moves, it may be time to stop asking how much work you have, and start asking how much of it should never have been there in the first place. - [Where the Day Went](https://theonlyaxelj.com/en/shop/introduction/personal-order-time): Names for what eats the day, a sort you can mark against, and one structure that takes twenty minutes to set up. --- [עברית](https://theonlyaxelj.com/he/study/articles/too-much-work-is-not-the-problem) · [Español](https://theonlyaxelj.com/es/study/articles/too-much-work-is-not-the-problem)