I've had similar issues in the past, so I use both coolspear's "Quicker Sim Autonomy & Simulation Lag Improvements" (
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) and TURBODRIVER's "Simulation Unclogger" (
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), to prevent sims from standing around waiting to do the stuff I asked them to do. FWIW, the unclogger ocasionally seems to delete a queued action, but overall it seems to do the job pretty well.
With RedAppleNet specifically, I had major issues until I removed NPCC, but now it works beautifully, I my sim no longer has to stay late to get their work done.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that on some lots where there are a lot of sims (e.g. when using Itasan2's Get To College mod), I sometimes need to pause the game for a few seconds to let it catch up with everything that's going on. I need to check if using one of the different versions of coolspear's lag fix has an effect on this or not.