Teaching Teenagers to Get Things Done

During "Character Camp" this summer, we taught our 12 and 14 year old boys life lessons from the book "tThe 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens.  Three of the 7 habits relate to getting thing done:

• Begin with the End in Mind
• Be Proactive
• Put First Things First

To help with all three of these, I've started to teach them one of the techniques from the book whose methods ("GTD") I'm adopting for myself, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.  They don't need to apply all the techniques in the book.  I just want to focus on the one time management habit that will help them the most, both now and for the rest of their lives.

I'm helping them start lists of their short term goals and the very next 1-2 steps they can take to reach those goals.  As I described in my last blog, it might take 10 steps to achieve a goal.  But GTD suggests you focus your attention on the 1 or 2 that you need to take first.  Once my kids acquire this habit, I can imagine them continuing through life, in college, at their jobs, starting their families, maintaining their homes, all with a habit of documenting his goals and the immediate, concrete next steps that move them to those goals.  I see them conquering procrastination because it is second nature to them to define the next immediate task and then do it quickly.  I picture the rewards they'll receive, personally and professionally, for habitual, swift execution.

Now back to reality:  here and now I'm faced with kids who just started back to school last week, who habitually slept until 10am all summer, who will watch TV 24 hours a day if you let them.  How to get started with this new change?

I started by picking the system in which to document their lists.  Should it be in a notebook or planner?  Not going to work.  My kids would be happy if all the pens, pencils, and paper in the world were destroyed in an inferno.  It has to be something in a computer.

I tried and failed to convince them to use Outlook, then Excel.  Then it hit me:  my 14 year old uses "Google Docs" to store information he uses to write his brilliant football blog http://player-rater.blogspot.com/.   I worked with him to create a simple 2 column spreadsheet:  The first column is "Goals", and the second column is "Next Steps".

The first project we worked with was "Sleep Better".  He had major problems sleeping all summer.  We Googled "tips for insomnia" and ended up listed about 20 things he could begin to do immediately, that same day.  In most cases, you would only want to list 1-3 next steps, but in this case, they could ALL be done immediately and he was committed to do them all.  It's only been a few days, but he's been sleeping like a baby.  Now we have to start to build up the list of goals and actions, and I have to do this with my other son as well.