I write my middle schoolers’ assignments on a weekly to-do form. Each entry is assigned on a particular day (Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday—the other days, we coschool). They check the assignments off as they are done. Chores go there too. At the end of the week, I file the to-do list away as my record of what got done.
When my oldest started high school, we simply dropped the to-do list, and I started giving him assignments weekly. That worked pretty well—he’s always been a responsible one—but not as well as I would have liked, at least at first.
As my current 14yo enters the second half of his eighth grade year, I want to lead him a little more intentionally through learning to keep track of his own assignments. It seemed to me that the bullet journal is a good place to start for this one:
- He’s a very physically active, kinetic sort of teenager, easily attracted from his work and never sitting still. He craves novelty. A planner page that can’t be changed is a planner page he’ll get bored with.
- He doodles on absolutely every piece of paper you put in front of him. Extra blank paper will help.
- He has been developing his power to stay on task through distractions and interruptions by practicing the pomodoro technique, at my encouragement*. This involves making a little check mark on paper when an interruption or distraction comes along, as a way to sort of satisfy the urge, and perhaps writing down the thought or desire so one can come back to it; and keeping track of how many cycles of 25-minute work periods and 5-minute rest periods one accomplishes. So it helps to have extra blank paper for this, too.
*Tip for helping a distractible young person learn the pomodoro technique: Immediately reward them with a piece of candy upon completion of each pomodoro.
Besides all these, I had been watching some videos promoting bullet journaling as a good technique to help the ADHD brain manage tasks. A child psychologist evaluated the 14yo over the summer and did not diagnose him with ADHD, but we were advised that he has a few things in common with kids who do receive that diagnosis, and I thought that the video advice might apply to him.
I had a nice new graph paper composition book, the kind I like best, lying around waiting to be used for something. So I snagged it, along with some pens and a ruler, and waited for an opportune time.
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Before I sat down with him I put some thought into how I would introduce it. I didn’t want to overwhelm him with too much information at once, so I decided that we would set it up over several days, and start with the absolute minimum. I drew up some dummy example pages, made from photocopied blanks, as I planned them. Here is what I settled on:
- Page 1: blank
- Pages 2–3: Index
- Pages 4–5: Blank for now in case we need to add something
- Pages 6–7: Future log, generic on the left, monthly on the right:
- Pages 8–9: Sort of a monthly log, generic on the left, dated on the right; only instead of a calendar month, it’s just going to be for the next five weeks, Monday-through-Sunday.
- Pages 10–11: The first weekly log. The left page would be where I would write the week’s assignments, to start a to-do list. The right side would be divided up into the days of the week.
For the time being, no daily logs. I figured I would only introduce those as they became necessary.
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On the first day of the second semester I sat down with him, the notebook, and writing supplies. I explained that instead of to-do lists every day, we were going to start practicing time management weekly. "I will write your weekly assignments in your notebook on Monday mornings," I explained. "You'll check them off as you go. Then, at the end of the week I'll photocopy your list and save that for my records, and you'll keep the notebook from week to week."
Here's how I told him to set it up:
1. "Number the first twenty pages or so." No point in going crazy and numbering the whole book at once; when we run past the first twenty, we'll number another few.
2. "Turn to the spread on pages 10 and 11, and copy the weekly log." I had him copy it exactly: ruled lines, dates, and all. He had a mostly-blank page on the left, and a space for each of the next seven days on the right.
3. "I'll write your week's assignments on the left side of the page." I fetched my own pen and my school schedule, and with him watching I wrote out his list of assignments on the undated side. I wrote them organized by subject, which is how they come out of my brain: first the week's three history assignments, then the week's three science assignments, and so on.
"I was thinking, sometime I want to learn to make scones," he suddenly interrupted me.
"Good thought!" I said, and added "make scones" to the bottom of the list. Aha, I thought, I can use this later.
4. "For each of these tasks we'll make a check box, just like the ones you're used to having on your to-do list." I drew a little square to the left of all the tasks (including "make scones").
5. "When you finish a task, fill in the box completely. Here, let's start a key so you can see what you're doing." I grabbed a pad of large-format sticky notes and wrote:
6. "If there's anything that you already know you absolutely have to do on a particular day—say, this science quiz that you'll take on Friday—we're going to migrate it to that day." I went down the list and found the science quiz, and showed him where to copy it into the Friday box. And then I showed him how to fill the weekly check box with the "migrated forward" symbol, and added it to the key:
I had him migrate a few more things to specific days. While he was at it, I had him add some new dated events that we thought of: confirmation class on Wednesday, for instance, and painting, which we only do on Fridays.
7. "Now turn back to page 6 and label the very top of that page 'Future Log.'" He went back and wrote that down. I didn't have him add the twelve-month calendar just yet.
8. "If there's anything on your weekly list that you realize you're not going to get to this week, but you still want to get around to it sometime, you'll migrate it back to your Future Log."
He looked confused, so I said: "Look, let's talk about those scones you mentioned, okay? Let's say you won't have time this week to make scones, but you still want to do them sometime and you don't want to forget that you had the idea."
"Okay..."
"Go back to your Future Log and put an entry for 'make scones.'"
He did this. Then I brought him back to his weekly log and showed him how to make the "migrated back" symbol in the check box. And the we added it to the key:
9. "The last thing to do today is make an Index." I had him go back to page 2, label it Index, and add the following entries:
Future Log p. 6
Jan. 15-21 p. 10–11
And that was the end of our first session with the teenaged bullet journal. Tune in next time for the introduction of the monthly-ish log and a summary of how it all went. And possibly a recipe.
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