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 adults

The value planners add to teens’ lives

Why we need to change our overall approach to homework

The silver linings of distance learning.



While procrastination might feel inevitable, Leslie’s advice is
here to guide your teen towards reaching their high...