How To Teach Our Children Skills To Manage Time

I am sure all of us would agree that time is a commodity that God has given equal to all of us; we all have the same 24 hours or 1440 minutes in a day to make our life a failure or a success. We need to instill this in our children to help them make their lives productive.

Here are a few points worth thinking about to take action: 

a) My grandma always impressed me when she said that great habits are built in the cradle and stay with us all our lives. So childhood is the best stage of life when parents like us can stop complaining about the lack of time and teach children how to manage time to do more work in less time.

b) Right from childhood children need to be taught to think over and chalk out their short term and long term goals; short term goals could for a day or week, while long term goals could be for achievement in 6 months or one year. Parents should teach children to set these goals based on their personal weakness and strengths. Children realize their priorities by setting goals; they concentrate on the essential and learn to eliminate what is not important and are motivated and productive to act.

c) We as conscientious parents need to encourage our children to plan their day and set time slots for each job to enable better accomplishment. They should be encouraged to eliminate time wasters like spending time on idle gossip on the phone or in person with negative people or spending time on the internet to just pass time.

d) Socializing good provided it is with positive people and in building great relationships that help release stress and feel more productive. The importance of relaxing activities like rest, sleep, exercise and meditation that refresh the mind, body and soul need to be instilled in children to help economize time in the long run. Time management and productivity can also be enhanced by inculcating habits in children to stretch out and relax between activities.

e) Being a smart parent in inculcating time management skills in our children also means cultivating a habit in them to maintain a dairy to note down all the things they did each day. This would help pin-point wastage of time on un-essential things, with time slots where essential tasks could be accommodated. This would also help to accommodate some, “My time” to help enhance concentration and productivity in our children.

f) Time management also means doing 2 tasks that could be accommodated in the same time slot; children could be encouraged to exercise as they watch the TV in the evenings and they could catch up on peer news on the way to and from school.

g) Last, but most importantly emphasizing to our children that procrastination leads to stress and lower productivity and the need to do unpleasant and important tasks first would help. Also children need to be taught to break up bigger tasks into smaller ones to keep them motivated with a sense of achievement.

Have we taught our children all about managing time?