⏰ Do Now — Start Here
Of these 3 sample requests on the board, which would you tackle first, and why?
🎯 Today's Big Question
- How does the class decide who works on which incoming request, and in what order?
📈 By the End of Today, You Will Be Able To
- Evaluate an incoming request for scope, urgency, and required skill/resource.
- Assign (or volunteer for) a job appropriately sized to an individual or small team.
- Set a realistic internal deadline for a job, working backward from the client's need-by date.
🧰 What You'll Need
- Sample/mock incoming requests (3-4, varying urgency and scope)
- Assignment board (physical or shared Doc)
📋 Your Plan for Today
- Mini-lesson: how to triage requests by urgency and scope (10 min).
- Practice: in groups, triage 3-4 sample requests, deciding an order and a rough team size for each (15 min).
- Set up the real assignment board: create the shared system the studio will use all semester to track live jobs and who owns each one (20 min).
📚 Key Words
- Triage
- Quickly sorting incoming requests by urgency and scope to decide what gets worked on first.
- Scope
- The size and complexity of a job -- how much work it will actually take.
- Internal Deadline
- A team's own target finish date, set earlier than the client's deadline to leave room for revisions.
✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include
Triage practice reviewed as a class; live assignment board checked for a clear owner per job going forward.
Exit Ticket: What would you do if two urgent requests came in on the same day and you only had one team available?
📊 Before You Leave
Quick, anonymous class check-in -- takes less than a minute.
🔗 Want to Learn More?
- No extra links for this lesson.
🚀 The Extra Mile
Cross-Class Connection: The same prioritization logic a Business/Operations unit covers in resource allocation and scheduling.
Career Connection: Triage and workload management is a real daily skill for freelancers across every career on the Careers hub.
Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:
- Design a visual triage board (physical or digital) the whole studio can use to track incoming jobs at a glance. Start here: list your last five real incoming jobs and sort them by deadline first — that sorted list becomes the board's first column.
- Write a one-page "how we prioritize" policy document — real operational material a growing studio would actually need. Start here: write down how you actually decided what to work on first this week, then turn that real behavior into the policy document.