How do you deal with people who treat everything as an emergency?
I've been an EA for several years now, but I recently switched to a completely different industry than the one I'm used to. Still getting my bearings and learning the business as I'm totally unfamiliar with all of it.
I manage multiple execs, they're all extremely busy. One of their direct reports has latched onto me and will instant message me about 20 times a day at a minimum and sends tons of emails to me/my execs, even before/after hours. She seems to treat EVERYTHING as an emergency and pressures me to get answers immediately.
Since I haven't been in my position even 6 months yet, I've been answering her IMs and emails to the best of my ability and trying to help out because I know that she is genuinely short staffed and needs assistance. I'm also trying my best to balance my exec's time and not pester them for every little question this person has.
Like every day for the past 2 weeks she has asked if so-and-so exec will attend xyz meeting. The meeting is on the calendar and the exec has accepted it. Obviously they will probably attend! I've confirmed with the exec the first time she asked, but I don't want to annoy my execs with silly little questions like this anymore. It's not productive, and as far as I know they haven't had any attendance issues so idk where the anxiety is coming from.
Another example that really bothered me is that one of my executives had a personal emergency recently and needed to be out of office on short notice. Exec let everyone know what was going on, everyone seemed supportive and wished him well and understood that things needed to pause for a minute. But this person IM'ed me because she "needed" to get a meeting with the executive, it was important supposedly and she really pressured me to get "just 15 minutes." It left a bad taste in my mouth that not even a personal emergency would cause this person to stop and think about what she's really asking for. If I tell her "no, exec is booked today sorry, I can get you time next week" she doesn't always accept that answer. She will say "what about just 5 minutes at 5pm?? I can do a late-night call too, what about this evening???"
It's getting to the point where I feel stressed any time I hear the IM ping. So, experienced EAs who have dealt with this type before, what strategies have you employed to reduce this kind of behavior?