Is there a better way to handle the constant stream of “small but urgent” tasks?

Hey everyone,

As a team lead, I'm constantly running into a specific problem and I'm curious how others are dealing with it.

The scenario is always the same: on Monday, the sprint is perfectly planned. By Tuesday morning, an urgent bug is reported by a key customer, or a "small" feature request comes in from the sales team that has to be done this week.

Suddenly, I have to pull a developer off their main task. They lose context, their original task gets delayed, and the whole sprint plan starts to feel like a suggestion rather than a plan. It's incredibly frustrating.

I'm trying to understand how other managers handle this chaos.

• How do you deal with these "sprint-killer" tasks? Do you have a dedicated dev "on-call"? Do you just accept the deadlines will slip?
• What's your process for delegating small-to-medium tasks (e.g., fixing a non-critical bug, writing technical documentation, building a simple internal tool)? How much of your own time does the handoff, explanation, and code review take?
• Have you ever wished you could just clone a senior dev for a day just to clear out the backlog of these smaller, but necessary, tasks?
• What's the most time-consuming part of your job that isn't meetings?

Just trying to gather some real-world stories and best practices from other engineering leaders.

Thanks for any insight.