What strategies do you use when managing competing priorities?
As an Executive Assistant (EA), your ability to prioritize effectively is a vital component of the EA role. Your interviewer is qualifying your ability to successfully manage competing priorities with a systematic approach. They want to ensure that you can demonstrate the ability to autonomously prioritize your responsibilities and tasks with little to no intervention. They want to validate that you are capable of working independently so that they are free to manage their own high-level tasks. Lastly, they want to be certain that they trust your decision-making skills around prioritization. By providing answers with concrete frameworks, you demonstrate your skills around prioritization and when it's best to leverage each framework.
Prioritization framework methods:
Force Ranking
Hundred Dollar Method
Moscow Technique
Numerical Assignment Grouping
Ivy Lee Method
"I leverage a variation of prioritization techniques depending on the tasks at hand. For daily task management, I like to use the Moscow Technique. With the Moscow technique, I focus on must-have time, should-have time, could-have time, and will not have time. This approach allows me to strategically bucket my workload in relation to risk, impact, and project size. However, when I prioritize a project's tasks, I find that the Ivy Lee Method is the best approach. This method keeps me on task for six specific actions, not moving on to new tasks or adding until my task list until the initial six are complete. I believe it's important to utilize different techniques depending on what I'm prioritizing."
Community answers are written by other candidates practicing this set. Reading how others frame the same question is one of the fastest ways to sharpen your own.
Anonymous Answer
As a Department Coordinator, you have to manage many projects all at once. I really enjoy having a list. I write as much as I can, everything gets added to a list. I use the MOSCOW method by creating my list by rank what I must complete, should complete, could complete, and won't complete. Also at the end of the day, I use the Ivy Lee Method and make sure to list tasks for the next day. While also using the MOSCOW method.
Marcie's Feedback
Interesting! It sounds like you have several methods that work for you in order to successfully prioritize and organize tasks and projects. Great job.
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