4 Ways for High School Students to Improve Time Management Skills
If your students are like ours, they struggle A LOT with managing their time. Instead of studying or doing homework, many of our students find themselves glued to their phones for hours after school (thanks TikTok). I mean…if we’re being honest…sometimes we struggle with the same thing!
Time management is such a critical life skill. Not only do we need to juggle all the tasks we are required to do at work, but as working moms we need to juggle our kids schedules, to do lists, errands, grocery lists, after school activities, doctors appointments, sports schedules, meals, etc. The list goes on and on and on.
Over time, we have developed strategies to manage our busy lives. Now think back to when you were a high school student. Time management was just as critical but did you have strategies like you do now? Probably not. Our students are expected to be independent at the high school level, yet many of our students really struggle when it comes to time management. And once our students fall into the hole of social media or video games, it becomes hard for them to prioritize their school work.
We love showing our students how to use these simple tools to help support and/or develop their executive function time management skills:
- Task completion – Get your students to gain a better understanding of how long they think an activity will take versus how long it actually takes using this worksheet. Before the students complete the task, have them estimate how long it will take. Then have them complete the task and keep track of how long it took them to complete. Then reflect and compare expectations vs. reality. Did the task take them longer or shorter than they thought? Should they have allotted more or less time?
- Plan out your day – This planner is broken down by the hour. Help your students write in their daily schedules for one whole week. Help them plan out specific blocks of time that are to be utilized solely for school work or studying – no excuses!
- Weekly prioritizing – Help students learn how to organize their weekly tasks based on the four box method. Start by writing down everything they need to do for the week and assign each task a priority level. Then rank the tasks by priorities using the 4 box method. This helps students visualize which tasks they need to prioritize.
- Daily prioritizing worksheet – This worksheet helps students visualize their daily list, write the due date, assign it “high priority” or “low priority,” and check off when completed. Students find this super helpful when their brains are so scrambled and overwhelmed and they just need to write their list down. We even use this in our own personal lives when giving our husbands to-do lists.
Do you teach your students any of these strategies? Which do you find most effective? Leave us a comment!
If you’re looking for these worksheets, check out our time management tools on TpT.
