To help your child become an autonomous and resilient learner:
Teach him a time management habit that only takes five minutes per day.
Time management is about much more than cramming as much work as possible into a limited time period. Planning-out your tasks can actually reduce a lot of unnecessary stress. As Georgetown University professor Cal Newport points-out, it’s exhausting to have deadlines and obligations floating around in your mind all the time. In his book, How to Become a Straight-A Student, Newport suggests a time management system that helps achieve a healthy work-life balance and that only requires five to ten minutes of effort per day. Here is how it works:
- Create your calendar: Use some sort of calendar (online or printed) into which you enter your activities, chores, and assignment deadlines, as well as dates on which to start those assignments.
- Create your daily to-do list: Every morning, consult your calendar and write-down a daily schedule that maps-out when you have activities and when you will work on your chores and assignments (it can be as simple as a piece of paper).
- Manage your to-do-list: During the day, cross-off what you have accomplished and write-down any new chores, assignments and deadlines that come up.
- Update your calendar: In the evening, consult your to-do list and add any new chores, assignments and deadlines to your calendar. Next, switch the date of anything you did not accomplish that day to a new date in your calendar.
- Create a new to-do-list: The next morning, create your new to-do-list based on your updated calendar.
- Repeat steps 2 to 5 every day! Good routines become good habits, which set you up for success.