We ask students to prioritise constantly. Sort your workload. Focus on what matters. Do the important thing first.
But prioritisation isn't one skill – it's several, layered on top of each other. Holding multiple deadlines in mind at once. Weighing consequences that haven't happened yet against work that feels urgent right now. Filtering out tasks that feel pressing but aren't actually important. Then trusting that judgement enough to act on it.
For students with ADHD, Autistic Spectrum Condition, dyspraxia or dyslexia, several of these processes can work differently. Time can feel less linear, so a deadline three weeks away doesn't register with the same weight as one tomorrow. Everything can arrive with the same emotional volume, making it genuinely difficult to tell what's actually urgent from what just feels urgent. And once a student has settled on a priority, second-guessing it can undo the progress made in getting there.
For students with anxiety or depression, the barrier often looks different – not an inability to judge urgency, but a struggle to start or sustain the task at all, even once the priority is clear.
None of this is about discipline. It's about how executive function works.
The trouble with "high, medium, low"
Picture a student looking at their task list at 11pm, trying to decide what's actually urgent. An assignment due in four days. A reading list that's been sitting untouched for two weeks. A message from a coursemate they still haven't replied to. All of it feels like it can't wait.
Most task tools ask students to label their own priorities: high, medium, low. Simple enough, in theory. But for a student who struggles to gauge relative urgency in the first place, that label can be just as hard to assign as the task itself.
It's a familiar pattern: students marking everything high because everything feels high, or defaulting to medium because they genuinely can't tell the difference. The label was meant to reduce the cognitive load of deciding what to do next. In practice, it can just relocate that load somewhere else.
Eisenhower was onto something
This is why we've moved away from high, medium and low in Booost, in favour of Must, Should and Could.
It's not the first attempt to fix this problem. The Eisenhower Matrix – sorting tasks by urgency and importance – is probably the most widely taught prioritisation framework, and it's popular for a reason: it's a genuine improvement on a flat priority scale. But it still asks the same underlying question we've already identified as the hard part: is this urgent, is this important? For a student whose sense of urgency doesn't reliably align with real deadlines, asking about urgency and importance separately won't make either any easier to work out.
Must, Should and Could take a different approach. A "must" task carries a real deadline or a real cost if it's missed. A "should" task matters, but it has flexibility in when it gets done. A "could" task is worth doing, but nothing breaks if it waits.
It's easier to ask "what happens if I don't do this today" than "how important does this feel right now.”
It can also make conversations between students and support staff more concrete. Rather than working through vague concepts of importance, a conversation can start from something specific: what's a must this week, what's a should, what can wait.
What this means in practice
Booost still does the surrounding work that makes prioritising possible in the first place: surfacing deadlines, showing what's coming up, and breaking tasks into a clear first step. Must, Should and Could is one part of that – a small piece of a wider system built to reduce the cognitive load students carry.
For task support to genuinely make a difference, it has to meet students where the difficulty actually sits. For many, that difficulty isn't remembering what needs to be done. It's working out what matters most, and trusting that judgement enough to start.
A small change, built on a bigger idea
This change started with what we already knew – from working closely with students, assessors, and the neurodivergent community – about where a flat urgency scale falls short. But we didn't want to rely on that alone. We put it to students directly, and the response was clear: over 75% preferred thinking in terms of consequence rather than urgency.
If you're recommending Booost as part of a student's support, this is worth knowing: the aim was never to give students another list to sort. It was to remove one more decision they were struggling to make alone.