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It's that time of year again! School has been in session now for several weeks. How is your student managing their time? Do you find yourself constantly nagging them to do their homework? Do they always end up doing a large project the night before it's due? Managing their time and organizing the tasks they need to do is a common issue for today's students.

So how can you help them? First, ask yourself some questions. Do they have a good system in place to track all of their to dos? Do they proactively plan and work ahead? Do they have a way to look at their extracurricular commitments AND their school work in order to see possible future time crunches? Do they understand the benefit of working ahead and not doing everything at the last moment? Do they have an organized, uncluttered space to do their work with appropriate supplies and limited distractions? Do they have both a paper filing and electronic filing system (they should be similar) in place so they can easily find the information they need to do their work?

One of the most important things a parent can do to prepare a child for schooling at the next level (e.g., middle school, high school, college), is to make sure they have good time management and organization skills to manage their workload. Each year, the amount of work a student is expected to manage increases. The system they used previously needs to be continually improved to meet their additional workload.

I'm amazed that our schools don't actively teach our students to do this as part of their education. If you're lucky, they've had a teacher that made this a personal priority. I've seen so many capable students whose work suffered not because of their ability, but because of limited organizational and time management skills.

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