A colleague just said to me "rather you than me having to juggle all these moving parts"; and I brushed it off nonchalantly, in the way only a person who lies awake most nights worrying about all the moving parts can do. Businesses DO have a lot of moving parts, and if you run a small business, a lot of those parts rest with the owner: always tapping you on the shoulder saying "just think what a clusterfuck it would be if I go wrong".
The reality of this is that there are only a set number of ways in which an owner/operator can manage this level of complexity:
Hire more people to take on chunks of this. It comes with a financial cost of course, but it also means you are swapping a bucket of problems for a human. You pays yer money, you takes yer chance.
Try and work every hour there is and keep on top of them all. Which is madness, that will lead to madness. You still won't be able to keep on top of everything, and your ability to emotionally handle the day job will collapse.
Pretend that everything is going to be okay, and ignore everything that doesn't actually, physically, catch fire. I mean, sounds like a plan doesn't it?
Make a conscious decision to ignore specific areas for a set period of time; and rotate your attention between all the areas of the business over multiples of this period.
Me, I am currently practicing 20% of Option 2, 45% of Option 3, and 50% of Option 4. Yes, I know this adds up to more than 100%, but read Option 2 again. I know Option 4 is the intentional, stand out, only-sensible-option-in-the-list, and should be the solution of choice, but reality doesn't take prisoners. It also requires foresight into which areas are going to need your attention in advance - I find that my hit rate on this is low. I am however, very good at spotting the first wisps of smoke as a process begins to self-immolate, so leaving a portion of my time intentionally free to put out the current fires seems to work.
So generally I am saving mornings for fire-fighting - this is most likely to be when the issues are going to arise: the guys get in the plant and the machine won't work; a big request for quotation drops; a customer didn't get his goods this morning and is throwing a wobbler; some idiot changed the website last night after his second glass of wine and it is now lagging like nothing else... (that would be less painful to type if it hadn't happened 10+ times). These tend to be short, sharp pieces of work, alternated as I wait for replies or action to be taken. But I'm actually good at juggling that sort of thing, so it works.
The afternoons I try and have a broad agenda. So Monday afternoons I'm going to look at top of funnel Facebook ads for all the business units. Tuesday afternoons: email list flows. Wednesday afternoons: improving content and products on one of our smaller sites that has good potential. Thursday afternoons: looking at operational improvements. And Friday afternoons: admin catch-up. I'll change these in a month or two so other areas get scheduled attention.
Well, this is the plan anyway. And no plan survives first contact with the enemy...