A request-triage guide for an executive assistant usually hands over a matrix: score each request's urgency and importance, or its stakeholder weight, and assign a zone once. The CEO Delegation Matrix scores every task on authority and leverage at authoring time and resets on a fixed quarterly calendar; Aurora's Inbox Zero triage charter sorts requests into three lanes by a rule an assistant writes down once. None recomputes a category's own zone from what actually happened the last time something in it was delegated.
Halberd Instruments' chief executive, Thea Marchetti, receives requests from outside her leadership team by email, Slack, phone and in person: customers, vendors, press, investors, conference organizers, and staff asking for an exception. Her executive assistant, Priya Anand, logged all 185 of them across thirteen weeks, 6 July to 4 October 2026, tagging each by category and by outcome: escalated direct, delegated and resolved, or delegated and bounced back anyway. A category's delegation rule comes from its own bounced-back rate, but only once ten delegated attempts exist to compute it from.
Conference & award invitations ran a flawless thirteen weeks: zero bounces in eight delegated attempts. It still defaults to escalate, because eight is one short of the floor, and the rule of three puts the true rate as high as 37.5 percent despite the clean record. Headcount & org exceptions looks worse on paper, one bounce in ten, and still clears the floor for the lighter heads-up rule. The same register is what an executive calendar audit prices by the hour: every category on it is time Thea did not have to spend.
Executive Assistant Triage Template