A short video walking students through practical methods for ranking and tackling tasks, useful for any level of study where workload management is a struggle.
About the resource
This is a narrated video that introduces several established prioritisation frameworks; the Eisenhower Matrix, the Impact-Effort Matrix, and the MoSCoW method, alongside two daily-planning techniques (the Rule of Three and the 2+8 Method). It starts by encouraging a full “task dump” before any ranking happens, then works through each method with a worked example task list.
It was produced for Durham University’s Academic Skills Centre, in collaboration with Durham students, as general study-skills content rather than material tied to a specific course or module.
How you could use it
This would work well embedded in induction week content or a study-skills module, similar to the note-taking video. It could also be split apart: the four frameworks (Eisenhower, Impact-Effort, MoSCoW, Rule of Three/2+8) each stand alone well enough to use individually as short teaching prompts, for example showing just the Eisenhower Matrix slide before a seminar on time management.
Note: A reuser would need to know that the running example (seminar reading, essay planning, food shopping, etc.) is illustrative and easily swapped for institution-specific tasks. The closing slide references Durham-specific support routes (1:1 consultations, drop-in sessions, a SharePoint resource site), which would need localising or removing for use elsewhere. Also, the video uses third-party illustrations (unDraw) and icons (Phosphor Icons) under their own licences, and background music from Pixabay under the Pixabay Content Licence, not the CC BY 4.0 licence applied to the rest of the resource. If you strip the audio out or reuse it separately, you’d need to source it from Pixabay directly.
Licence and attribution
© Abby Catterson, Durham University, CC BY 4.0, 2026.
Note: the third-party assets in the video/slides (unDraw, Phosphor Icons, Pixabay audio) sit outside this licence and carry their own terms.
Download or access the resource
Watch/download the video (to download the video, click the three dots at the top right of the page and select Download Podcast)