Smart agenda for your children
We are facing an absolutely unique school year due to the pandemic. Many parents will be preparing for multiple circumstances, with the desire to provide the best for their children as much as possible. At Task & Time, we want to offer you encouragement, and we hope that you can also find joy despite the uncertainty. And we want to help you in your journey in a fundamental aspect: in ensuring that your children acquire strong study habits.
You will have noticed throughout the months of quarantine: time management can and must improve, since many of our children lack independence and get lost in carrying out tasks. Educating them to do what they have to do at a specific time, ordering their tasks within a schedule, organizing their time well and striving to meet goals is very important. And who is accompanying them in this growth? The fundamental burden often falls on parents and it is not an easy task for most.
It’s not just about getting good grades, or even getting homework done on time. To acquire strong work habits, and study discipline, is to enter life on the right foot, both personally and professionally. The skills needed to manage time well are enormously valuable, as we have seen in our work and family life. When students are in school, when they are young, is the best time to develop and strengthen those skills. Thus, we will truly be preparing them for life.
An agenda is necessary
We have to take into account an apparently minor detail: Which agenda will our children use during this semester? Because if we want to develop strong study habits and to manage our time well, we should have an agenda.
Paper agendas are useful to remember what is written in them: exams, due dates, parties, appointments with teachers, online classes, etc. But with the arrival of COVID, it seems that their days are numbered and a step towards digital is imposed for health reasons. There are well-known, fantastic applications, such as Google Calendar, that far exceed traditional calendars as we can always have the data available whenever there is an Internet connection and we can make changes at any moment.
This agenda can no longer be lost, something very common among children, teenagers, and not so teenagers. An even more interesting aspect of these digital calendars is how easy it is to share them and add events from shared calendars. If we are going to take our children’s work habits seriously, they should have an agenda that they can share with you, where you can enter tasks from your own calendar. So we already have four advantages when it comes to using a tool as simple as a digital calendar:
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It is hygienic
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You can’t lose it
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It is easy to edit
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It is sharable
In addition, in the mentality of students, this type of agenda is not a burdensome and worried parent, but a technological element that helps facilitate something that students also want deep down: to finish their homework on time. And this is a point in favor that we propose for your reflection.
The smart agenda
But jotting things down on an agenda is not yet planning or managing time well. To plan well, you have to reflect on the pending tasks and their due dates and organize them with care. This step is hard for us all, our children even more so. And yet it is a fundamental step, because we all need to locate our activity in time to be effective and not waste time. We need a plan and, if possible, a good one.
Since planning well is difficult and time consuming, we have built an agenda that automatically schedules your study time: Studeam. It is an intelligent agenda, capable of automatically ordering tasks based on pedagogical and common sense criteria, including appropriate breaks to sustain your attention. This way, we will be able to provide students with a powerful tool to start developing strong study habits. Studeam is more than an app, it is a simple time management education method.
Parents will not be the ones who plan homework sessions for their children, nor will our children, who prefer to start with the easiest tasks first; but rather a tool has been created that allows students to reduce their self-deception and reflect on their day (avoid procrastination, please!). By automatically offering an objective plan, we will all save time and disagreements about whether or not your children have been doing what needs to get done.
The semester is over, let’s prepare well for the next! And if we must have a calendar, a smart one is the best!
