How to prioritise when everything is due the same week
Three assignments, one Friday. A calm way to decide what to do first, without pulling an all-nighter or guessing which thing matters most.
Zhang Junkai
Updated 5 min read
It is Monday night. A lab report is due Friday, a group project slide deck is due Friday, and there is a tutorial worksheet you were supposed to hand in last Friday. You have opened all three documents. You have written nothing in any of them.
The instinct is to start with whichever one you happened to open last. That is usually the wrong one, and it is the reason the week goes badly.
Start with whatever unblocks other people
Before you rank anything by size or by deadline, find the tasks that other people are waiting on.
The group project slide deck is not really one task — it is your section, then someone else merging it, then someone reviewing the whole thing. If your part lands on Thursday night, the deck realistically does not get finished.
Anything with a person downstream of it moves to the front of the week, even if it is small, and even if the deadline is identical to everything else. A 45-minute job on Monday can be worth more to the final grade than three hours on Thursday.
Then rank by how much of it is thinking
Split the rest into work that needs a functioning brain and work that does not.
- Thinking work: the argument in the essay, the analysis section of the lab report, deciding what the slides should actually say.
- Mechanical work: formatting references, redrawing a diagram, transferring raw readings into a table, tidying slide layouts.
Thinking work goes in your best hours — for most people a block early in the day or straight after a break, not 11pm. Mechanical work is what you do when you are tired but still want the day to count for something. Trying to write your discussion section at midnight is how three hours produce two paragraphs you delete tomorrow.
Work on one of them at a time
Having three assignments open does not mean working on three assignments. Flick between them and every switch costs you the time it takes to find where you stopped, reload what you were thinking, and decide what to do next.
That cost is bigger than it feels. The researchers behind the classic task-switching experiments estimated that shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someone's productive time. On a week where you have four or five genuinely free hours, losing a chunk of it to restarts is the difference between finishing and not.
One block, one task, then close it.
Give every task a time, not a day
"Finish lab report Wednesday" is not a plan. It is a wish with a date attached.
The version that works names the hours: Wednesday 4–5.30pm, results and discussion. When a task has a specific slot, two things stop happening. You stop rewriting the plan every morning, because the decision is already made. And you find out immediately whether the week is possible — if the three tasks need eleven hours and your week has six free, better to discover that on Monday than on Thursday.
If it does not fit, that is information, not failure. Something gets a smaller scope, or you ask for an extension on Tuesday rather than apologising on Friday.
Protect one buffer block
Leave one empty slot on Thursday. Not for a specific task — for whichever thing runs over, because one of them will. A plan with no slack breaks the first time something takes longer than you guessed, and then the whole week reads as a failure rather than a single bad estimate.
What this looks like in practice
For the Monday above:
- Monday, 45 min — write your section of the group deck. Send it. Other people are now unblocked.
- Tuesday, 90 min — lab report results and discussion, the thinking half.
- Wednesday, 45 min — lab report formatting, references, diagram. Tired hours are fine for this.
- Wednesday, 30 min — the overdue worksheet. It is overdue because it is small enough to keep postponing.
- Thursday — buffer. Whatever ran over, plus a read-through of the deck.
Five blocks, roughly four hours, spread across four days. Compare that to the version where you do nothing until Thursday and then lose a night.
If the week genuinely does not fit
Sometimes the arithmetic says no, and no amount of ordering fixes it. Then you are choosing what gets less — so choose on Monday, in daylight, rather than at 11pm on Thursday by default.
Usually that means one piece gets the real work and one gets a competent minimum: the essay gets the argument it deserves, the worksheet gets answered correctly and briefly. Two complete submissions beat one polished one and one that never arrives. And if something has to move, an email on Tuesday that names what is done, what is left, and a realistic date is a very different message from an apology on Friday night.
The work did not get smaller. It just stopped being a single undifferentiated pile of dread, which is most of what makes a week like this feel impossible.
If this keeps happening rather than being a bad week, the problem is usually upstream in how the plan is built — that is a different fix. And if the real constraint is that your week is already full before any of this arrives, start with how to study when you have no time.
Common questions
- What should I do first when everything is due at once?
- Whatever unblocks another person. A group project section that three people are waiting on has to move before a solo essay with the same deadline, because your part finishing late means the group's part finishes very late. After that, rank by how much clear thinking a task needs and match it to the hours where you can still think.
- Should I start with the easiest assignment or the hardest?
- Neither, as a rule. Start with whatever has a person waiting downstream, then match tasks to the energy you actually have — hard thinking work in your best hours, mechanical work like formatting and references in your tired ones. Starting with the easiest just because it is easy is how the vague, important one gets pushed to Thursday.
- Is it better to finish one assignment at a time or work on all of them?
- One at a time, in blocks. Switching between tasks carries a real cost — the researchers behind the classic task-switching experiments estimated that shifting between tasks can eat as much as 40% of productive time. On a week with four or five free hours, you cannot afford to spend a chunk of it reloading context.
- How do I ask for an extension without it looking bad?
- Early and specifically. An email on Tuesday saying which parts are done, what is left, and what date you can realistically hit reads very differently from an apology on Friday night. The thing that makes an extension request look bad is almost never the request — it is the timing.
- What if I have already left it too late to do everything properly?
- Then you are choosing what gets less, and it is better to choose deliberately than by accident at 11pm. Decide which piece gets the real work and which gets a competent minimum, finish both, and hand in two complete things rather than one good one and one missing one.
A version of this was originally posted on Instagram.
