Three tasks, all marked urgent, one of me. How do juniors handle prioritization?
My PM, my tech lead, and a support escalation all want something from me "today." Each is reasonable in isolation. Together they're impossible, and I'm the newest person on the team, so I have the least context on what genuinely matters most.
My instinct is to work fastest-first and pray the important one wasn't also the slow one. That is, predictably, a bad strategy.
So how do you handle competing "urgent" work when you're too junior to confidently judge business priority on your own? Do you kick it back to all three and let them argue it out? Escalate to your manager and ask them to rank it? I feel like there's a skill here nobody ever taught me.
2 comments
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AnonymousAnon Everything being "urgent" usually just means nobody's ranked it and they're each optimizing their own corner. You're not too junior to ask "what breaks if this waits until tomorrow?" — that one question sorts real urgency from default urgency shockingly fast.
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AnonymousAnon The move is to make the tradeoff visible instead of silently absorbing it. Go to whoever owns your priorities and say: "I've got A, B, and C all marked today, I can realistically do one of them well by EOD — which one?" Making them choose isn't weakness, it's literally the job.