Ahh… A procrastinating teen and time management.
I remember a parent on a recent brainstorming call saying, “I always remind them to start their assignments earlier, but we still had to rush to Officeworks the other night to get everything. When will they ever learn?”
This is something I get asked about not just every week but EVERY DAY.
It can be frustrating to watch your child stay up late at night and rush their assignments, which can lead you to assume that they don’t know any better. But what a lot of parents don’t realise is that your child already knows nothing good comes from procrastination (or maybe they just don’t quite believe it anymore).
In fact, almost every teenager I have ever worked with can easily regurgitate ten things they should do to manage their time better. And yet, a 2022 survey by Studiosity confirms that eight in ten students admit to struggling with procrastination. Teenagers are still not in full control of their time.
With exams fast approaching, we know your child cannot afford to start preparations late and run out of time. So, it’s time we talk about exactly why your procrastinating teen can’t seem to manage their time.
In this article, we explore how you can improve your child’s time management skills, make sure they internalise time management principles and transform their procrastination into effective study habits that stick.
Procrastinating Teen to Productive Student: Eddie’s Success
When we met Eddie, he was a typical Year 12 student who liked to enjoy life outside school. He loved playing sports and his social life, and even had a girlfriend.
Eddie was an incredibly bright student. But with so many things going on, his academic life was utterly disorganised and unstructured. He was easily distracted and frustrated by how long studying took, so he often left everything to the last possible minute. Eddie also didn’t have enough time to do practice exams.
As a result, Eddie couldn’t manage his time during exams and struggled to articulate his answers. He lost marks because he was careless or rushing, and couldn’t finish his responses. Everyone, including Eddie’s teachers, recognised that his exam results fell below his full potential.
Eddie wasn’t the kind of kid to ask for help. But Eddie’s mum, Yvonne, realised her son needed further support to ensure he doesn’t miss out on crucial future university and career opportunities. That’s when Yvonne reached out to our team.
Our education strategists helped Eddie create a personalised study strategy to manage his time and distractions effectively, preparing for and during exams. We helped Eddie adopt study skills that would allow him to catch himself from distractions and self-correct his actions. We also helped him leverage his study time to increase his marks while reducing the time, effort and stress needed. Eddie then became more motivated and consistently put effort into priority areas that would make the biggest impact on his results.
Five sessions later, all his hard work paid off.
From being a procrastinating teen struggling with typical distractions, Eddie was able to reach an atypical outcome. He achieved an ATAR 18 points higher than his predicted ATAR and got straight into his preferred university course.
Improving Your Procrastinating Teen’s Time Management
There are so many concepts and tips your child could use to manage their time, like using diaries, ‘chunking’ tasks, setting routines, etc. All that are good, but the real challenge for most parents doesn’t have anything to do with the principles of time management or even how to explain it.
That’s why Yvonne’s real genius was her ability to identify what her son needed to change his poor habits. It wasn’t more information about how to manage his time. Yvonne recognised that Eddie needed help making the change.
Eddie needed a way to make a scary thing more ‘palatable’ to his taste so he could take that tiny first step… and then the step after that. If Eddie hadn’t found a way to accept time management principles and actually do the work, he would’ve just rejected the help and spit it back in Yvonne’s face.
It’s getting that buy-in from your child first, and then making sure it permanently sticks.
If you really want your child to be in full control of their time — on their own without anyone asking them to do so, you need a strategy to help them accept time management principles and repeat good practices to ensure the new habits stick for the long haul.
It’s the secret ingredient to making time management more palatable for your procrastinating teen, whose preferences probably lean towards spending their time on their screens, with their friends, on their hobbies or whatever they’re feeling at the moment. (You can check out the ‘secret’ strategy here.)
At Kalibrate-Ed, we also use time-management tools as a kind of ‘procrastination focaliser’ to help teens deal with their procrastination and take their time-management skills to the next level. With this approach, your teen doesn’t have to worry about procrastination, distraction and stress that comes with leaving things at the last minute. Its mechanisms enable your child to self-identify and course-correct independently whenever they feel fatigued or distracted.
If you want to know more about this approach and other strategies that can help your child improve their time management skills and beat procrastination for better academic results in Semester 2, we’re hosting a free LIVE session on Wednesday 26th June with Australia’s leading experts on career and university planning, academic productivity and well-being.
Click here to access the session, recordings and exclusive resources: https://studyresources.com.au/education-tipping-point-2024/
