By Karen Porter

As an administrative professional, you may have many reasons to learn and use prioritization skills. For instance, you might have 200 reasons — as in you support 200 staff members. And that figure is no exaggeration; there are executive and administrative assistants who support one or two staff members, and there are ones who single-handedly support every number on after that figure and into the hundreds. You cannot do multiple people’s work simultaneously. There is no such thing as “multitasking” in the sense that you do two or more different brain-intensive tasks at the same time. You must do such tasks and assignments that require concentration consecutively. But which ones do you do today?

Another reason to learn to prioritize is that you want to get home on time. Currently, you may be working through lunch and into your off hours just to keep up with the workload. And when you’re not at work, you’re at home thinking about it, or dreaming about it instead of sleeping soundly. That’s no fun and it’s stress inducing behavior (the bad stress).

Or perhaps you need to prioritize for the obvious reason: so deadlines aren’t missed. Your boss will love you for maintaining deadlines and not being the holdup who delays company-wide projects (thus keeping other staff working late or fast and furiously). However, your manager won’t be too happy if you miss multiple deadlines, despite your apparent diligent work ethic. Results matter! To produce the right results at the right time, you sometimes must prioritize your workload contents.

This list of reasons for learning to prioritize is perhaps endless, just like your workload seems to be some days. So let’s stop making lists and skip to the crux of the matter: What is prioritizing? And how do you prioritize your workload, specifically as it relates to being an administrative professional?

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