I had a coach that really helped me with this. In short, you need to sort out a lot of your stuff the day before so when you get in the throws of the day, you don't need to decide what you should be doing next. This is how I implement this:
- Putting together the basics - I set out my cloths (gym cloths if I have it planned for the day, also a way to make sure you don't forget socks lol), put together my food for the day (I get pre-prepared food), and I put my backpack with my laptop and stuff together. All of this goes in my living room so I can get ready without disturbing my sleeping wife.
- Work Activities - On Thursdays I'm time blocking for the next full week. I'm putting it in google so I'm getting notifications before I do things. The day before, I review the next day to make sure nothing changed. This way you can set your one big thing you need to get done the next week and spend the whole week achieving it, not thinking about it.
- Make sure your team knows during times you are getting the above things done, you aren't available for putting out fires.
- Give your team a decision making threshold - For field techs, it's $100 including their labor, Managers is higher. Whatever the problem is, you can always fix it with time and money right? So tell them look, if the problem you need to solve costs less than $100, just do it and tell me about it later. If it's going to cost more than that, escalate to your manager and they'll escalate to me if necessary. Obviously everyone's threshold is different but this helps a lot.
Also make sure you are spending time restoring yourself. You need to be drinking enough water, exercising, and getting enough sleep. This will expand your CAPACITY to handle more.
