What strategies are there to be a good junior when you're on several teams and very busy? Difficult to be responsive to the random urgent tasks when you're already drowning in other random urgent tasks.

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All you can do is clearly communicate what is going on to your teams tbqh

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Communicate is all you can do at this point. Going forward, I'd be better about communication before staffing or right when you get staffed. Be clear that if you keep getting adding you on things, you'll have to take smaller roles on cases and during busy times may need to completely step away from some of your cases. You can't be everything for every case, so it's about setting expectations and communicating future availability.

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Senior associate here struggling with the same thing. Folks know I’m busy. There aren’t any competent juniors around to help and I’m regularly pushing over 200/month, sometimes well over. Also working for a ton of partners. It’s so tough to communicate ETAs on deliverables when you’re getting pulled into meetings and unanticipated events daily. Telling them you’re slammed doesn’t protect you from new work. So, OP, you’re not alone. It’s a good problem to have that you’re busy and folks want to work with you, but if you figure out how to best communicate in that environment I’d love to know, because I’m stumped!

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Work harder and faster.

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Email flagging is key (if you haven’t already learned that). Double down on checklists and screen your email quickly every now and then to make sure you aren’t missing tasks. Clearly communicate your bandwidth and expected deliverable timing to seniors and make every effort to get through the storm without sacrificing quality of work. Ask more questions at the outset than you might normally to minimize any chance of unnecessary or duplicative work. It’ll be a challenge, but hopefully you can close some matters out and glide for a while after you’re on the other side of what sounds like a crazy month.

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I’ve struggled with this myself and I think the only thing that has worked in both getting some grace and not making it seem like I’m just complaining or trying to get out of responsibilities is to get a list of the next 5-10ish tasks/projects I’ve been assigned and speak to my supervisor about how I see how the priorities should be ordered. It’s then up to him to either agree or rearrange as he wants them done (sometimes he’ll even see it’s crazy and reassign tasks to someone else).

If you have more than one supervisor then bring them in together. If possible it’s best to handle in person to avoid any misinterpretations with just emails/chat messages. To me, that shows I’m both trying and putting some data behind the number of things I’m constantly asked to do that are borderline superhuman.

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