I feel your pain and find myself in that situation a lot.
I try and do that small stuff "as time allows", but that's very vague.

To the question of how to approach the situation: Triage them is my approach.

You take a quick look - very quick - and it gets classified as Urgent, Routine or Minor. I often do this list/log in excel. Urgents may get done immediately and bypass the rest of the processes. These are always judgment calls and the key is to adapt them to the circumstances - classifications in a startup will be very different to those in a more established company.

Then, I do an initial review of the details, the complexity, etc. I'll frequently review items with the product manager.

Then I enter the our issue tracking system (Pivotal Tracker) and give more thought to priority, effort, details, resources, etc.

Our Ticket Tracking System is then used interactively throughout the day (you even see other peoples 'actions'!).

I feel your pain and find myself in that situation a lot.
I try and do that small stuff "as time allows", but that's very vague.

To the question of how to approach the situation: Triage them is my approach.

You take a quick look - very quick - and it gets classified as Emergency, Urgent, Routine or Minor. I often do this list/log in excel. Emergencies may get done immediately and bypass the rest of the processes. These are always judgment calls (your 'urgent', my 'routine'!) and the key is to adapt them to the circumstances - classifications in a startup will be very different to those in a more established company.

Then, I do an initial review of the details, the complexity, etc. I'll frequently review items with the product manager.

Then I enter the our issue tracking system (Pivotal Tracker) and give more thought to priority, effort, details, resources, etc.

Our Ticket Tracking System is then used interactively throughout the day (you even see other peoples 'actions'!).

Triage them is my approach.

You take a quick look - very quick - and it gets classified as Urgent, Routine or Minor. I often do this list/log in excel. Urgents may get done immediately and bypass the rest of the processes. These are always judgment calls and the key is to adapt them to the circumstances - classifications in a startup will be very different to those in a more established company.

Then, I do an initial review of the details, the complexity, etc. I'll frequently review items with the product manager.

Then I enter the our issue tracking system (Pivotal Tracker) and give more thought to priority, effort, details, resources, etc.

Our Ticket Tracking System is then used interactively throughout the day (you even see other peoples 'actions'!).

I feel your pain and find myself in that situation a lot.
I try and do that small stuff "as time allows", but that's very vague.

To the question of how to approach the situation: Triage them is my approach.

You take a quick look - very quick - and it gets classified as Urgent, Routine or Minor. I often do this list/log in excel. Urgents may get done immediately and bypass the rest of the processes. These are always judgment calls and the key is to adapt them to the circumstances - classifications in a startup will be very different to those in a more established company.

Then, I do an initial review of the details, the complexity, etc. I'll frequently review items with the product manager.

Then I enter the our issue tracking system (Pivotal Tracker) and give more thought to priority, effort, details, resources, etc.

Our Ticket Tracking System is then used interactively throughout the day (you even see other peoples 'actions'!).