Ep 116: Time Management for More Focused Teens

Leslie Josel, author of How To Do It Now Because It’s Not Going Away and global time management expert, shares her passion for planners, productivity, and practicing. Find out the tricks for helping teens get more homework done (on time) and retain more information!

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Full show notes

When kids are tired from a long day of classes and basketball practice and it’s time to get cracking on some calculus, their gaze might drift from the textbook to their Instagram feed for an hour...or two hours...and then maybe they’ll watch a little Netflix, text their friends, make a TikTok...before they know it, it’s 10 p.m. and they haven’t even started!

Procrastination can get the better of all of us occasionally, let’s be honest–but for students, it can often become a damaging habit that holds them back from getting the grades they hope for or finishing a college app on time. When it comes down to it, procrastination can often take hold of a teen’s time and simply not let go.

To help kids battle their inner procrastinator and become time management experts, we’re talking with Leslie Josel, author of How to Do it Now Because it's Not Going Away: An Expert Guide to Getting Stuff Done. Leslie has been working with teens and college students for almost twenty years to help them untangle their lives from the sticky web of procrastination and create order from their own personal chaos.

In our interview, she’s giving you tons of tips to guide your teen towards living a more organized life. We’re chatting about how teens can tackle time management, what kids can learn about their habits by doing some self reflection, and how we can give students some control over their learning process to get them more excited about their education.

Teaching Teens Time Management

Leslie is seriously passionate about time management, and she’s got some innovative solutions to your teen’s procrastination problem. During our interview, she proposed a unique tool to help kids keep track of time, a tool they might not be familiar with: an analog clock. That’s right, a clock that ticks every second, with hands that move. You know, from the old days!

She insists that analog clocks serve an important overall purpose: visualizing and externalizing time. What in the world does that mean, you ask? It means using objects and divides to get a sense of the passing of time. This includes a calendar, a timer, a planner–and yes, an analog clock– things that remind teens exactly where in time we are. When teenagers place themselves on a timeline, they can better estimate how long it will take to complete a given task.

By using devices to externalize time, teens can give their daily tasks a beginning, middle and end, allowing them to effectively judge how much time they need to spend on this and when they’ll need to be done with that. Instead of just floating unmoored in the hours, they’ll be able to know where they need to direct their energy.

This comes into play when setting rules for kids about what they need to get done. Telling a kid to work on their homework for twenty minutes before sitting down to dinner is going to be a lot more comprehensible than asking them to finish their assignment, Leslie says. In the episode, she breaks down other ways we can help kids stay in control of their time, instead of letting time control them.

Helping Teens Understand Their Habits

For teens to master time management, they first need to identify where and when procrastination seems to take its toll. If they can take some time to consider their daily habits, they’ll be able to find where they’re going wrong and solve their productivity problems.

Leslie encourages teens to map out their time usage in a day on a piece of paper or digital document. This gives them the chance to identify where in the day they are losing time to procrastination, when exactly they are most productive, and what they can do to improve their overall time management.

This activity pushes your kids to confront themselves so that you don’t have to! Instead of telling them that they waste too much time, encourage them to record their own data about their habits–they’ll be able to see their procrastination on the paper in front of them! It can be a thought provoking and even fun experience for them to reflect on how they live and how they can maximize their productivity from day to day.

Leslie says that if kids do realize they have serious time management problems, they often explain their behavior as a self fulfilling prophecy. They think that poor time management is “just the way they work” or simply describe themselves as “lazy”. In the episode, Leslie talks about how we can help kids change their attitudes to shift their self image and become the productive people they were meant to be.

Once teens get to the bottom of their procrastination problems, they’ll be able to manage their time more effectively...but how can we help them go even one step further? By finding the study methods that grant them the most effective learning experience.

Discovering the Right Study Habits

When we look at the research, we find that the most common source of disagreement and discord among teens and their parents is homework. All teens have to do it, but not all teens study the same way–creating a lot of tension between teens who are fed up with what’s expected and parents who just want to see students successful.

Leslie says what teens need to do is discover their own personal studying preferences. Some students do their best work at a coffee shop, surrounded by crowds of talking people. Others prefer to listen to rock music as they solve equations, or, as Leslie hilariously mentions in an anecdote in the episode, sit in the bathtub! When students understand what works best for them, their productivity will get a boost.

There are also lots of other small ways Leslie says kids can become better learners. Incorporating physical activity into the long hours of hitting the books helps improve retention of material. Reviewing things about a half hour before bedtime is also a proven method to help info stick in teens’ brains. Incorporating variation into study habits keeps things exciting and has been shown to be effective at helping teens remember facts and figures.

In the episode, Leslie talks about why she personally objects to the term “studying”, saying we should instead opt for the word “practice”. She believes it’s more active, more energetic, and more interesting than “studying”, and helps kids see studying as something to be desired in the same way they might practice soccer, guitar or dancing. We discuss this in more depth in the interview.

In the Episode…

Leslie was such a joy to interview this week, and her ideas about teenage productivity are so helpful to parents everywhere. In addition to the topics mentioned above, we cover:

Why teens procrastinate more than adultsThe value planners add to teens’ livesWhy we need to change our overall approach to homeworkThe silver linings of distance learning.

While procrastination might feel inevitable, Leslie’s advice is here to guide your teen towards reaching their highest level of productivity. See you next week!

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