Successful Teens Know How to Prioritize

Guiding your teens to build their planning and prioritizing skills, pays off big time in their school and life success, satisfaction…and even leisure opportunities.

The development of prioritizing skills during the school years is critical for time management in higher levels of education or employment, when monitoring decreases and routines vary constantly.

What one gets from prioritizing skills

Prioritizing involves managing time effectively to make sure that the appropriate tasks are completed. When kids are successful at prioritizing, they can evaluate goals and allot more or less time to tasks based on difficulty, time demands, and importance of the outcome.

Heighten their motivation and prioritizing skill development efforts by encouraging them to think about things they don’t have enough time for now. What could they enjoy if they efficiently plan and prioritize where to dedicate their time and effort? When teens become skilled at prioritizing, they gain more control of their free time without guilt or pressure about tasks you know they “should” be doing.

Examples of benefits of prioritizing to discuss with kids to boost motivation include these:

• Completing daily homework in less time and increasing its quality
• Turning in papers and projects when due, instead of last-minute scrambling
• Saving time by having all work for reports, projects, and jobs together and in an accessible way
• Not missing appointments, meetings, deadlines, releases of ticket sales, or dates with friends

Setting the stage for their success

Prioritizing demands increase as school years progress and long-term projects and reports become more prevalent. It is also during these years when teens take on more social, athletic, club, and community activities.

Many teens think they are not good at prioritizing and never will be because they have not been successful so far. Build their motivation to put in the effort and try new strategies by helping them recognize successful prioritizing tasks they have already done:

• Selecting choices of which television programs to prerecord
• Choosing items to pack for their school backpack or small bag for a trip
• Picking the most important information to study for a test when they did well

Starting with the power of prioritizing homework

Homework is a great place to build prioritizing strategies. Guide them to consider which tasks are most valuable, challenging, and critical to do. Then, with that awareness, plan the amount of time and the order in which they’ll do the day’s assignments.

Written plans can help—especially when they create them for themselves. Here are examples of how they can create a day’s homework plan:

1. List the tasks to be done to complete the assignments for each subject, including any items they need to bring in the next day.
2. Rate each task from 1 to 5 to indicate its importance to the outcome or grade.
3. Write down how much time they think they’ll need for each task. Take into consideration the rating of importance they designate for each task.
4. Use these estimates to write down the predicted start and finish times for each task.

• Set a timer for estimated finish time to stay on track so they don’t overspend time on low-value tasks and run out before doing the high-value ones.

Kids can use a similar table for prioritizing in advance of future long-term projects.

• Include five-minute breaks after about 20 to 30 minutes of focused work time. These planned breaks reduce temptations to interrupt work to respond to texts, check email, or lose efficiency with other distractions.

When kids evaluate their insights about what worked and what they would change, it powers up their brains’ prioritizing skills. Encourage them to go back to the homework plans they prepared and followed for a few days and think about how things went.

Source: geralt/Pixabay

Long-term projects

As teens develop the skill of prioritizing, they’ll be able to evaluate which tasks are the highest priority and break the habit of putting off the ones they like the least, but that count the most.

The goal is for them to prioritize how they’ll divide their time before starting a long-term project or for planning a study schedule for final exams. Help them use calendars or written plans to schedule time allotments based on their evaluation of the importance of that task.

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Opportunities can include the following:

• Create a plan for breaking long-term tasks into doable daily steps.
• Make a list of all the parts of an assignment, project, long-term plan, or big goal. Just write down the tasks as they come to mind, and then revise the list in the order in which things should be done.

• Next to each item, write stars to indicate the importance or value of that task to the outcome or grade.
• Write estimates for the time they predict each task will take.
• Know when they do their best work and plan their schedule accordingly. Plan to do “high-value” tasks that are particularly difficult at the times when they feel their brain's power is at its best (for example, first thing after school, or after some exercise, or before others come home and the house is noisy).

Prioritizing the most relevant information

Prioritizing involves determining hierarchies of importance and separating information or material based on relevance, value, and time requirements.

Prioritizing is also used for students to evaluate the value of information they use to effectively solve problems. This type of prioritizing might include determining which information in math word problems is necessary to reach a solution, what is extraneous, and what information is needed to solve the problem. Similarly, in reading, prioritizing involves the ability to recognize main ideas and essential characters and give this information more attention than lower-relevance details.

Prioritizing skills are also critical for kids to separate less-relevant details from the main ideas of a text, analyze essay questions, select what lecture information to include in notes, and decide what material to study for a test. Ask them what strategies they would use for the most efficient use of their time and effort.

Guide them to prioritize relevance on topics of their interest in magazines, newspapers, Web sites, or instructions for games they want to learn. Have them tell you the main ideas they recognize and which facts they feel are consistent with the major topic.

To prioritize information—that is, to emphasize what they need to remember from a lecture or textbook reading or what to study for a test—teens can use the approach of a news reporter. This familiar nursery rhyme will show them how it works:

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.

Jack fell down and broke his crown

And Jill came tumbling after.

• Who? Jack and Jill
• When? Not known
• What? A fall
• Where? A hill
• How? Using pails
• Why? To get water
• What is the important message? When on top of a high place, watch where you step.

Now invite them to use the same system to recognize the most important information to remember from a section of one of their textbooks or literature reading assignments.

Each time teens try this strategy, their brains will become more efficient at recognizing high-priority material.

Reflections about the outcome of their efforts

Teens can use these questions as guides for self-evaluation:

• What did I do that was the best use of my time?
• What improvement did I first notice?
• What did I try that I’d do again?
• What would I do differently next time?
• What other strategy do I think will boost my success?

Conclusion

It increases effort and future motivation when your kids take time to recognize and appreciate the impacts of their efforts. They might first note their greater success in things such as staying on top of assignments, class preparedness, or timely completion of long-term projects. Continue to encourage them to acknowledge their evolving skills and independence in using them. Share with them the recognition of the reduction in family strife, nagging, and frustrations. As your teens improve, give yourself a pat on the back for your efforts that supported their successes.