Get control of the interaction
Shift from a request-response dynamic to a collaborative approach. Instead of bearing all the responsibility, establish a plan where both parties contribute, alleviating your workload
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I’m sure you feel annoyed when someone is demanding a lot from you, and you can’t fulfill everything they ask for.
I have read that the same thing happens to entrepreneurs. Sometimes the smallest client is the one taking most of your capacity with unreasonable requests.
The approach we’ll follow
An advice is to “fire this client”. But this is a luxury. You may not have this option.
What we’ll do is change the dynamic away from a request-response where the responder has all the responsibility.
Instead of you being the bottleneck, you set up a plan in which you both collaborate.
This alleviates your effort and removes the annoying periodic polling that most requesters have. I’m sure you have seen these kinds of threads when some people manager asks periodically “Any news on this?”.
This is very useful when teams request something from your team. Once we had a request where the requester team was apparently impacted by us, but didn’t understand how things worked.