How to Implement a Priority Scoring System With Your EA

Hiring a great executive assistant doesn’t stop the requests from landing on your desk. When your EA has no shared rule for what matters most, every call comes back to you anyway.

We’ve matched executives with senior EAs since 2018. And the partnerships that run smoothly all share one habit. The executive and the EA agree on how to rank incoming work before it arrives.

This guide shows you how to implement a priority scoring system with your EA in 6 steps. It also comes with a sample scorecard you can copy.

TL;DR: How a Priority Score Works With Your EA

Here’s how a priority scoring system works between you and your EA:

• You name the 3 outcomes that matter most this quarter.
• Your EA scores each request on 4 weighted criteria.
• The score tells your EA whether to act, schedule, decline, or bring the request to you.
• Only the requests that need your judgment reach your desk.
• You test the rules for a week, then review them each month.

What a Priority Scoring System Gives You and Your EA

A priority scoring system is a short rubric you and your EA agree on. Your EA rates each incoming request against the same few criteria, and the total tells them what to do next.

It all comes down to the difference between urgent and important work. In a 1954 address in Evanston, President Dwight D. Eisenhower quoted a former college president who said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.”

Urgent requests demand attention now. Important requests move your goals forward, even when nobody is pushing for them.

A scoring system turns that difference into daily decisions. Here’s what you and your EA actually get:

• Fewer check-ins: Your EA stops asking you to rank requests that the rubric already ranks.
• Consistent decisions: Similar requests get the same answer on a busy Monday and a quiet Friday.
• A protected calendar: Low-value requests get declined or redirected before they ever reach your schedule.
• More autonomy over time: Your EA learns how you weigh trade-offs, so they need less direction each month.

Why Requests Still Land on Your Desk When You Have an EA

A seasoned EA can make dozens of small calls on your behalf every day. But they still need to know which calls you want to keep for yourself.

Without a shared rule, the work bounces back to you for 3 reasons:

• Your EA has to guess: When your priorities live only in your head, the safe move is to check with you first. And every check-in pulls you off the work in front of you.
• The loudest request wins: A stakeholder who emails twice can look more urgent than a quiet deadline that matters more. So other people’s urgency crowds out your own goals.
• Nobody set decision limits: Your EA can’t decline a meeting or approve a quote until you say how far their authority goes. Until then, each of those calls lands with you.

Every one of those is a gap in how the work is set up. A priority score closes all three.

You’re a 30-minute meeting away from saving hours of your time every week. ProAssisting places senior US-based EAs who have supported leaders at brands like JPMorgan Chase, Oracle, and Airbnb, for 50 to 80% less than a comparable in-house hire. Book a free consultation with ProAssisting to find out if a ProAssistant fits your workload.

6 Steps to Build a Priority Score Your EA Can Run

These 6 steps take you from your goals to a score your EA can use on every request:

1. Name the Outcomes That Matter This Quarter

Your EA can only score impact against goals they actually know. So start by writing down the 3 outcomes you most want to reach this quarter.

Good outcomes are specific. Think closing a funding round, launching a product, or renewing two key clients.

Then share the list with your EA in plain language. A short weekly priorities check-in is a standing meeting that keeps those outcomes current as the quarter moves.

2. Choose 4 Scoring Criteria and Weight Them

Your EA needs a few fixed criteria to judge every request the same way. Use these 4, each scored from 1 to 3 and multiplied by its weight:

• Impact on your outcomes (weight 2): How directly the request moves 1 of your 3 quarterly outcomes.
• Time sensitivity (weight 2): How soon the request needs action.
• Executive-only (weight 1): Whether the request needs you personally. Step 3 shows you how to draw that line.
• Cost of a wrong call (weight 1): How hard a mistake would be to undo.

Impact and time carry double weight because they decide when the work should happen. With these weights, every request lands between 6 and 18. And you can adjust the weights during the one-week test in step 5.

3. Set the Line for What Only You Can Handle

The executive-only score decides who acts on a request. It gets a lot easier to set once you know what an hour of your time is actually worth.

According to our book, The 29-Hour Work Day, you can price your hour by dividing your annual net profit by 2,080. That’s the number of hours in a year of 40-hour weeks.

You can run the same math on salary for a quick benchmark. The median annual wage for chief executives was $213,990 in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That works out to about $103 an hour.

Our co-founder Ethan Bull told Forbes in 2019 that executives should hand off their $20, $50, and $100-an-hour tasks. Their attention belongs on the work worth $1,000 to $10,000 an hour.

So share your hourly figure with your EA. Any task that isn’t worth your rate should score low here, even when it feels important in the moment.

4. Turn Score Bands Into Decision Rights

A decision right is an action your EA can take without asking you first. Split the 6-to-18 range into 3 bands. Then use the executive-only score to decide whether your EA acts or brings the request to you:

Set dollar limits wherever money is involved. You might let your EA approve any expense under $500 without asking, for example.

When your EA declines on your behalf, our book calls it the velvet no. It means saying no so gracefully that the person asking still feels respected.

This works best when every request runs through your EA first. Our book calls that the Chief of Staff role, where your EA is the single point of contact for your team, clients, and vendors. And it’s a different job from the traditional chief of staff, who owns company goals and metrics.

5. Test the Score on One Week of Real Requests

For one week, have your EA score every request that competes for your time. Then spend 10 minutes at the end of each day reviewing their calls together.

Look for any request that landed in the wrong band. When you find one, adjust a weight or tighten what a score means. The rules are ready when you and your EA would score the same request the same way.

6. Write the Rules Into Your EA’s SOP

Once the score holds up for a week, put it in writing. Add it to your EA’s standard operating procedures (SOPs), the written playbook they follow for recurring work.

And if you’re onboarding a new EA, drop the rules into their first-week materials.

Your SOP entry should cover 4 things:

• Your outcomes: This quarter’s 3 outcomes and the date you last updated them.
• The rubric: The 4 criteria, their weights, and what scores of 1, 2, and 3 mean.
• The decision table: The band table, so your EA can check any request in seconds.
• Your hard limits: Your spending caps, the topics that always come to you, and the people who can reach you directly.

Then review the rules with your EA once a month, and update your outcomes at the start of each quarter.

You can also download the free priority scorecard template as a spreadsheet. It adds up each score and fills in your EA’s next step for you.

Here’s how 5 typical requests score on this rubric. The raw scores follow the table’s order of impact, time sensitivity, executive-only, and cost of a wrong call:

So only 2 of the 5 requests reach you this week. Your EA handles 2 on their own and holds the speaking invite for your monthly review.

The score works best when the same EA runs it for years. ProAssisting’s fractional model gives you a set share of one senior EA’s time, and more than 75% of your monthly retainer goes straight to your ProAssistant. That fair pay is what keeps experienced EAs in long partnerships. See how fractional executive assistant support works.

Signs Your Priority Score Needs a Reset

A score that fits your January priorities can drift by March. These are the signs the rules need an update:

• You keep overriding the score: If you’re changing your EA’s calls more than once or twice a week, a weight or a definition is off. Fix the rule so you stop fixing each request.
• Your outcomes have changed: A closed round or a finished launch changes what counts as high impact. Update your list the same week.
• Your EA starts checking in again: Frequent questions usually mean one line of the decision table is unclear. Rewrite that line in plain words.
• Low-value work reaches your calendar: When vendor calls and optional meetings keep showing up, your lowest band may be too narrow. Raise its upper cutoff by a point or two.

Tracking a few executive assistant KPIs makes these signs easier to spot. Two useful ones are the hours you reclaim each week and how often requests come back to you.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are quick answers to the questions executives ask most about priority scoring with an EA:

How Many Criteria Should a Priority Score Use?

3 to 5 criteria work well for executives. 4 is a good starting point, because your EA can score a request in under a minute. Add a criterion only when real requests keep landing in the wrong band.

Can a Fractional EA Run Your Priority Scoring System?

Yes. At ProAssisting, you choose one-third, one-half, or two-thirds of a ProAssistant’s capacity based on your workload. Our executive support quiz is a 2-minute assessment that helps you see which share fits.

Should Every Request Get a Score?

No. Your EA only needs to score the requests that compete for your time or need a judgment call. Routine tasks with an obvious answer, like confirming a meeting, can go straight through.

Should Your EA Score Personal Requests Too?

Yes. Make 1 of your 3 outcomes personal when it fits your quarter, like protecting family dinners during a heavy travel month. That keeps a school event from losing out to a routine meeting.

Do You Need Software to Run a Priority Scoring System?

No. Your EA can add a score column to your task manager or a shared spreadsheet. Working in tools you already use means you won’t have to learn a new system.

Run Your Priority Score With a ProAssisting EA

A priority score teaches your EA how you think. Over time, they start making calls the way you would, and that shared judgment is where the biggest time savings come from.

The right EA gets you there faster. That’s where ProAssisting comes in. We provide premium, executive-level support from senior US-based EAs who have backed leaders at brands like JPMorgan Chase, Oracle, and Airbnb.

Fewer than 5% of applicants make the cut. Each ProAssistant supports no more than three executives and replies within an hour during US business hours. Plans start at $3,300 a month for one-third of a ProAssistant’s time.

Book your free consultation to get matched with a ProAssistant