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, autism, 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 hard 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 late on a Sunday night, trying to decide what's actually urgent. A report due tomorrow. Reading they haven’t touched for two weeks. Three unread emails from their tutor. None of it feels like it can 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 do, Will do and Might do.
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 real 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, that question doesn't get any easier just because it's split into two.
Must do, Will do and Might do take a different approach. A “must do" task carries a real deadline or a real cost if it's missed. A “will do" task matters, but it has flexibility in when it gets done. A “might do" 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." In an early poll, students told us the same thing – a majority said they'd rather think in terms of consequence than urgency, which matched what we were already seeing in practice.
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 do this week, what's a will do, what can wait.
What this means in practice
Must do, Will do and Might do doesn't work alone. It sits alongside the rest of what Booost already does to make prioritising possible – surfacing deadlines, showing what's coming up, and breaking tasks into a clear first step. Together, they're built to reduce the cognitive load students carry, not just relabel it.
For task support to 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.
If you're recommending Booost as part of a student's support, it's a small change on the surface. To the student trying to juggle everything alone, it's a way to judge what matters most – not by how urgent something feels, but by what happens if it waits.