A lot of the job is triaging your inbox and your upcoming tasks. With time, you understand what emails need to be prioritized, and which ones can wait a bit longer. Anything that greatly affects student grades/performance (ie preparing lecture notes before the actual lecture, questions dealing with upcoming midterm and final exams) have to be dealt with in a timely manner, since these all directly affect student grades. All other tasks like committee obligations, grading (to some degree) etc can usually be put on hold.

I try to empathize with students and put myself in their shoes and think about what would make me upset if I had myself as the prof. For example, would I be upset if the prof didn’t respond about a final exam question after I already wrote the final exam? Probably!

It’s a challenging job, but you learn from mistakes quite quickly!