Use this question bank to assess how candidates plan work, set priorities, protect focus, and deliver reliably. Each section includes prompts and cues for strong answers.

Prioritization & Planning

• How do you decide what to do first on Monday morning?
  Good answers: Weekly plan anchored to goals/OKRs, top 3 outcomes, triage of carry‑overs, and aligned stakeholders.
• Walk me through your weekly planning ritual.
  Good answers: Review past commitments, capacity check, blocks identified, calendar timeboxing, and buffer for unknowns.
• What framework do you use to weigh importance vs. urgency?
  Good answers: Impact × effort, Eisenhower, RICE; examples of saying no or deferring with rationale.
• Share a time you re‑prioritized mid‑week.
  Good answers: Clear trigger, stakeholder comms, updated plan, and met critical deadline.
• How do you ensure personal goals map to team/company goals?
  Good answers: Line‑of‑sight to OKRs, published priorities, and sync with manager/partners.

Scheduling & Timeboxing

• How do you structure your calendar?
  Good answers: Focus blocks, meeting batching, admin windows, and guardrails around deep work.
• What’s your policy on meetings?
  Good answers: Agenda required, right attendees, timeboxed, decisions/next steps captured; cancels when unnecessary.
• How do you protect deep work?
  Good answers: Do‑not‑disturb, single‑tasking, no‑meeting blocks, and measurable output.
• Describe a tactic to reclaim time in your week.
  Good answers: Kill rituals, consolidate tools, template common tasks, or automate low‑value work.
• What’s your approach to context switching?
  Good answers: Task batching, working sets, and handoff notes to reduce cognitive load.

Estimation & Commitments

• How do you estimate tasks you’ve never done?
  Good answers: Breaks down, finds analogs, ranges with confidence, and pre‑mortems risks.
• Tell me about a missed estimate and what changed.
  Good answers: Root cause, update to template/checklist, added buffer/early warning.
• What’s your rule for accepting new requests?
  Good answers: Visible backlog, clear trade‑offs, due date negotiation, and written confirmation.
• How do you track commitments?
  Good answers: Single source of truth (task system), due dates/owners, and daily/weekly review.
• What do you do when you’re running late?
  Good answers: Early signal, scope cut options, new ETA, and plan to prevent recurrence.

Focus, Interruptions & Energy

• How do you handle interruptions and urgent pings?
  Good answers: Triage windows, batch processing, escalation criteria, and service levels.
• When do you turn off notifications?
  Good answers: During deep work/after hours; provides SLA and backup coverage.
• What’s your approach to managing energy, not just time?
  Good answers: Schedule hard work in peak hours, breaks, and context‑aware planning.
• Tell me about reducing burnout while staying fast.
  Good answers: Sustainable pace, buffers, rotation on after‑hours, and recovery.
• How do you avoid over‑commitment?
  Good answers: Capacity limits, historical velocity, and explicit no’s.

Delegation & Collaboration

• What do you delegate and what do you keep?
  Good answers: Delegate repeatable/teachable tasks; keep critical/skill‑building ones; clear briefs.
• How do you brief someone to save future time?
  Good answers: Context, definition of done, examples, deadlines, check‑ins, and risks.
• Describe a time you unblocked a team’s timeline.
  Good answers: Removed dependency, parallelized, or secured a fast decision.
• How do you ensure async collaboration doesn’t slow you down?
  Good answers: Pre‑reads, BLUF updates, decision logs, and clear “need‑by.”
• What artifacts reduce rework?
  Good answers: Templates, SOPs, checklists, and examples.

Remote/Hybrid & Tools

• What tools are in your time system?
  Good answers: Calendar, task manager, documentation system, and simple dashboards.
• How do you keep distributed teams on schedule?
  Good answers: Clear SLAs, timezone aware planning, async updates, and handoff notes.
• How do you document decisions and due dates?
  Good answers: Decision log, owners/dates, and reminders.
• What dashboards do you rely on weekly?
  Good answers: Cycle time, WIP, blocked items, and on‑time delivery.
• How do you manage off‑hour requests?
  Good answers: Coverage plan, rotation, and criteria for exception.

Metrics, Cadence & Continuous Improvement

• What metrics define “on time” for you?
  Good answers: On‑time delivery rate, cycle time, throughput, and forecast accuracy.
• How do you run a weekly review?
  Good answers: Look back on wins/misses, update backlog, plan upcoming week, and adjust habits.
• What habit improved your time management most?
  Good answers: Example with measurable before/after (e.g., +20% deep work hours).
• How do you prevent small tasks from piling up?
  Good answers: Two‑minute rule, admin blocks, and triage routines.
• Share a process change that saved time org‑wide.
  Good answers: Quantified hours saved, adoption plan, and sustained results.

Anti‑Patterns & Ethics

• What are the signs of “busywork”?
  Good answers: No clear outcome, vanity metrics, meetings without decisions; kills or re‑scopes them.
• When is speed harmful?
  Good answers: Compliance/security/care contexts; uses checklists and approvals.
• How do you avoid time management becoming exclusionary?
  Good answers: Inclusive scheduling, flexible norms, and documentation for those async/remote.
• What do you stop doing to create time?
  Good answers: Ruthless “stop doing” lists and sunset ceremonies.
• Describe a time you prevented heroics.
  Good answers: Addressed root cause, redistributed work, and set realistic plans.

Case Study Exercises

• Calendar audit: Redesign a week to free 6 hours for deep work.
• Backlog triage: Prioritize 20 tasks into a 2‑week plan with trade‑offs.
• Deadline crunch: Scope an MVP to meet a fixed date; list cuts and risks.
• Meeting cleanse: Cut a 10‑meeting cadence to 4 while preserving outcomes.
• Throughput: Propose 3 mechanisms to reduce average cycle time by 25%.

Tip: Look for explicit priorities, realistic estimation, buffers, respectful stakeholder management, and calm execution. Time management shows up in systems and results, not slogans.