Time Management for Teens

Time Management For Teens – Episode 411

More in our series on time management, this show is for teens with The Homeschool Highschool Podcast, Vicki Tillman. Learn how to take your time back and learn about doing a time audit.

Special Guest: Vicki Tillman, who is one of the voices behind The Homeschool High School Podcast.

Check out Vicki’s Coaching: VickiTillmanCoaching.com

Listen to the podcast for the full conversation, here are some points we covered:

Vicki is a counselor and life, and career coach and she has been doing this for close to thirty years, and she has had to learn time management skills in order to juggle all those hats.

The digital age encourages distraction, with notifications popping up and too many tabs open, it’s really hard to keep our time under control.

Don’t wait until your children are teenagers. You know, if you’ve got them at that age, great, we can, we can work with whatever we have because we’re flexible because we’re homeschool parents, we just make it work. But encourage it as the kids are younger. When they’re younger, we can start enlisting some of these skills and encouraging them.

So one of the things that I think helps, especially when you are at the place where you have multiple ages in the house is to remember … that as moms, we have this picture in our heads of what we really want to accomplish, but we have to let God guide our footsteps and to be able to humbly set aside the things that just aren’t going to happen in the chaos of a day. But there are some things that we have to learn to structure and manage so that we can actually get education done with everybody that needs that.

So I have some ideas that I have used with my kids in our local homeschoolers that I’ve worked with over the years is the battle of time. When do they wake up to begin their day? Sometimes that’s not a battle you want to argue about. And sometimes it is, and it takes prayer. What character are we developing right now? But one of the things to do is to notice that there’s not one kind of high schooler. Some kids are the kind that requires your help to learn, to manage their time because they will just game all day or they’ll check out YouTube all day. Or they are naturally distractible or go with the flow.

And so they need some structures and some tools. And then there are some kids who are born structured, they get up in the morning and they want to get everything done, and they are working really hard. And those kids, you have to teach them time management. So they learn to turn that off and rest and hang out and, and let their brains and bodies do some other things besides being productive.

Know your kids and allow God, to show you what they need and help work with them in that way. So I’ll start with the easy ones, the ones that are naturally structured and will overwork themselves. One of the things that I suggest is to teach them how to do a time audit.

So it’s really simply put a time audit is to look at how we spend our time.

In this way, you can look at how you spend your time, and make sure you are not doing something you’re not supposed to be doing.

Have your teens write down every single thing they did and how much time they did it. And then after the end of a week or two weeks, if there’s a lot of variety in the things that you do you make a pie chart of those activities. And you look at this, these slices of pie. So a big slice of pie is for sleep, another slice of pie for meals, this slice of pie for study this slice of pie for chores, this for extracurricular, this is for friend time. This is for chilling and watching television or whatever. All the pieces of the pie are there. And then sit with your teen and say, is this how you want your pie to look? Do you see things that you’d need to change? I need more time for devotions or I haven’t spent any time with a friend in weeks. And then help them kind of redraw that pie that looks like a life with balance. Be sure to include time for self- care so that they stay healthy and don’t get too anxious.

And so for us moms, if we do the same, we will find some times that we have slices of pie that aren’t useful. Like the “death scroll” on Facebook. Now I can check Facebook once a day and that’s it. So you know, a timeout is just a wonderful thing for the type of kids who can’t turn off, who the ones that are over-structured. Okay.

When people see how much time they typically spend on that kind of thing, (like social media) then they can put that in perspective and say, okay, you know, I’ll put a timer on.

Listen to the podcast for the remainder of the interview.