If you have read most of my blogs you will know that I have children and often get inspiration from them.
I am very fortunate that my 14 year-old daughter is very disciplined and self-motivated when it comes to her homework. I have observed her religiously plan and complete her homework before it is due. I chatted to her (in her near teenage state you can imagine it was a one-sided conversation) to understand her techniques. Whether she do it naturally or used techniques subconsciously I don’t know, but I got little from her.
So on my crusade to understand her more, I observed her over a couple of weeks and identified the flowing tools that she, probably without realising her role in developing a Time Management theory, was employing.
Make a list.
She went old school and wrote a list of all her homework and revision and noted the issue date and the due date. She then used coloured markers to identify the tough ones (Yellow for Dad can help), the ones that would take time (green for these), the ones that needed references (blue) and lastly the ones that were just reading based (orange for her reading task). I have since introduced her to OneNote as a digital way of doing this.
Make your-self Accountable.
By openly telling either myself or my wife what Homework she was doing when, she made herself accountable and shared that accountability. Now it was not just her that had a deadline, her parents also knew the task.
As an aside, I have used this at Burrows with my Management team. We have used ‘Shared Accountability’ to help the team achieve their annual objectives. By having a peer know your objectives and monitor your performance increases the chance of their completion and creates a closer team bond.
Back to my daughter.
Schedule it
This ties into the two preceding points. Having listed the tasks and made yourself accountable you then plan when you do the work. This sounds simple but how often have you felt so underwhelmed with the number of tasks you should do; you do none of them.
Start early.
Like many people, my daughter works most productively in the morning. So at weekends she always does homework at the start of the day when she is refresh and, in her case, has not been distracted by Minecraft, Netflix, Snapchat……….
Starting early also describes how she avoids the night before scenario what I’m sure we all used to have when we were at school. When you put things off so much that you have a last minute panic and rush to get work done the night before it is due.
Celebrate success
Here is the easy bit. Once my daughter has completed a unit of homework, she will reward herself. It may be getting a drink, stopping to watch an episode of Once Upon a Time, or go out to see friends. It does not matter what the reward is but you must celebrate your achievements!
Ok so now my challenge is my 12 year old!!!!
by Richard Wright
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