How to Prioritize Assignments When Everything Feels Urgent

You open your laptop with 45 minutes before dinner and stare at a list of eight assignments across five classes. Everything is "due this week." You don't know where to start. So you spend 20 minutes trying to figure out what to do first — and then the 45 minutes is almost gone.

This is one of the most common ways students lose time. Not procrastination exactly — indecision. The good news is there's a simple framework for fixing it, and IntelliPlan can do the math for you automatically.

The problem with "everything is urgent"

When you treat all assignments as equally urgent, you're making an implicit decision: you'll do whatever is on top of your mind first, not whatever matters most. That's usually the easiest task, not the most important one. The high-stakes assignment due tomorrow gets pushed while you finish the five-point worksheet due Friday.

Real prioritization requires weighing three things at once: how soon something is due, how much it counts toward your grade, and how long it will actually take to finish.

The priority formula

A simple way to score each assignment:

Urgency goes up as the deadline gets closer. Point value reflects how much the assignment affects your grade. Dividing by estimated time rewards assignments you can finish quickly for a big payoff.

In practice, this means:

• A 100-point test tomorrow beats a 10-point quiz due in four days, even if the quiz is faster.
• A short assignment due tonight beats a long project due in two weeks, even if the project is worth more.
• Two assignments worth the same points — do the shorter one first if both are due tomorrow.

Why doing this manually is exhausting

Running this calculation in your head for eight assignments across five classes — while also remembering what's in each class, how each professor grades, and what your current grade is — is genuinely hard. Most students don't do it properly. They go by gut, which is usually off.

This is exactly the problem IntelliPlan was built to solve.

How IntelliPlan automates priority scoring

IntelliPlan connects to Canvas, StudentVue, and Schoology to pull every assignment automatically. It then scores each one using due date, point value, and estimated effort, and labels them High, Medium, or Low across all your classes at once. You see one ranked list — not a separate list per class — and you always know exactly what to work on next.

When you generate a study schedule, IntelliPlan places your highest-priority work in your nearest available time blocks and exports the result to Google Calendar. Planning goes from 20 minutes to under 5.

Read the FAQ for more, or see how IntelliPlan compares to other study planners.