By Jenna Prada, M.Ed
AT A GLANCE
An important executive functioning skill is planning and prioritization—the ability to develop a roadmap that will enable you to achieve a goal • Strategies to improve this skill include breaking projects into manageable chunks, creating a visual plan or schedule, and identifying a concrete system for prioritizing
People who have weak planning and prioritization skills find themselves hamstrung even before they begin an assignment or a task. They have difficulty identifying the steps required to accomplish their goal (e.g., creating a presentation, writing a paper, cleaning their room, etc.) and can’t decide what information and tasks are important to pay attention to and in which order they should attend to them.
Does this sound familiar?
If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, your will benefit from strategies to improve your planning and prioritization skills:
Do you…
- Feel overwhelmed by open-ended questions or long-term projects?
- Complete unimportant tasks prior to important tasks?
- Struggle to either say how you will study or what you need to study?
- Misidentify the important information from a class, meeting, or text?
- Lack clear goals even in areas of interest?
- Get caught up in the details and miss the big picture?
- Regularly complete assignments or other obligations late?
- Write disorganized essays or emails?
- Hold on to everything rather than decide which items to keep and which to throw away?
SKILL IMPROVEMENT STRATEGIES
Like most skills planning and prioritization can be improved with intentional, concrete instruction. Following are some guidelines to help your child in this area:
1. Clarify the goal
It’s impossible to plan if you don’t know what you’re planning for. That’s why it’s important to articulate what success looks like before getting started on a project or a task.
Examples: For a project, process the instructions to identify all of the requirements as well as the difference between “good” and “great.” When cleaning a room, desk, or bag, start by making a pile of everything that needs to be sorted.
Pro-Tip: Use this process to create a check-list containing the most important elements of the goal; it’s a great planning tool that will also support self- and task-monitoring.
2. Establish that planning is productive
Many people skip planning because they don’t consider it part of doing. They don’t want to waste time; they just want to get started. Reframe that: planning is doing something. It saves time by allowing you to work more confidently, it ensures that you won’t miss important aspects of the task, and it lowers stress levels by breaking multi-step to-do items into manageable parts.
For kids: To help your child see all of this, involve them in family planning, creating a routine around spending 15 minutes planning each day, or setting up a shared family calendar that helps them see the week ahead.
Pro-Tip: On the day a project is assigned, planning should start! Break the project into steps and set due dates for those steps (including a catch-up day or two).
3. Agree on a framework for prioritizing
Deciding what to do first is tough, particularly if you don’t have a consistent set of parameters to help you decide.
Examples: For young kids learning to distinguish between “need to’s” and “want to’s” is a good place to start. As your child gets older add complexity with a “1, 2, 3 system:” “1” means this needs to happen now; “3” means it’s the least urgent, and “2” is somewhere between ASAP and not urgent at all. Alternatively a simple four-box grid (sometimes called an Eisenhower matrix) may be useful, where the X axis represents urgency (“now,” “later” and the Y axis represents importance (“important,” “less important”), works well for most high school kids and adults.
Pro-Tip: Whichever system you or your child settle on, practice sorting a few example tasks so that you can adjust the system and be sure you have a similar understanding.
4. Provide lots of practice
Keep planning in the forefront by asking questions that prompt planning everyday tasks. Get started with the following questions then add your own:
What’s the most important thing to get done today?
Great! When will you be able to do that?
Can any of those things be done on a different day?
How does your week look?
For kids: Younger kids will also enjoy thinking through the steps for some of their favorite activities like how to build a snowman, set up a playdate with a friend, or be ready for a soccer game. Have them consider what can happen in one day, and what they need to start planning for in advance.
5. Experiment and adjust
Great planners know they always need a contingency. You and your child will both benefit from keeping this in mind. Anyone who manages projects at work knows that deadlines often need to be modified. Any parent knows that no day goes by without an element of unpredictability. Any successful adult took years to develop a planning system that works consistently.
Part of the benefit of regular planning is that it empowers your child to respond to the unexpected. When your child knows that their plans will need to be adjusted and that the first calendar they try out likely won’t be the one they ultimately stick with, they will come to see those inevitabilities as successes rather than failures, which ultimately will make them a better planner and a more resilient student.