Seven Year Old is Time Management Guru

This summer I have been taking efficiency lessons from my seven year old daughter, Kirstie. School is officially out, our “schedule” has been shredded and we are on “summer hours.” This means we have no strict schedule – just a lot of sporadic appointments and play dates. In order to maintain my sanity (and a clean house), I instituted the handy-dandy-chore-chart for my kids so they could be reminded of their daily duties. It also saves me from nagging them because I can say “check your chart”.

Being a time management geek myself, I have been delegating household responsibilities to my children since they were able to walk so that by this stage in their lives (ages 10 and 7) they can handle the majority of the weekly household tasks, freeing me up to get more work done on my business since my hours get shortened during the summer with them being home. I say shortened because I lose about two hours of work time from June-August chaperoning them in the pool or taking them to volleyball camp, etc.

My initial intention was to set them up on a loose schedule of getting up, making their breakfast and doing their chores before they were allowed to do any of their “fun” activities. That sounded reasonable to me by keeping them busy as I worked and it would motivate them to get their tasks done quickly. I spread the tasks out over the course of 5 days and estimated how long it would take them to do each task. I added bonus tasks at the end of the list as well which would be rewarded with extra privileges. I had no idea how well this plan could be executed until I introduced it to Kirstie.

Kirstie is the poster child for ADD. She’s not on meds or anything, but she is a fireball of energy and very easily distracted. She can only focus for a concentrated period of time if the object of her attention is something that intensely interests her like music, animals or swimming. Most other subjects bore her and she is not afraid to make faces to show you her disinterest. Facial animation is her specialty. Kirstie does not like routines either, preferring to make up her “schedule” as she goes along and her least favorite thing to do is chores, especially folding laundry. During the school year it was a battle to get her to help with the laundry because by the the time she arrived home from school she was ready to dive into her hobbies, not fold a basket of laundry. She would stall and procrastinate with the best of them and even do the chore extremely slowly. On one particular day, I remember it taking Kirstie well over an hour to fold one basket as she decided to try to weasel out of it by complaining of being sick after every item she folded. Once the basket was folded and put away, her “sickness” disappeared.

Fast forward to today where we are about 3 weeks into the chore charts. I was figuring that each day’s tasks would take my kids about 2 hours to complete individually. I’m not a slave driver, but I factored in things like music lessons – not just household tasks. The first few days, my estimates were right on target. Two hours seemed to be about right. Then gradually, it started getting shorter and shorter until earlier this week when Kirstie announced to me that she was “done” with everything but her guitar lesson so I looked at the clock and realized she had only been out of bed for about 30 minutes! I looked at her chart and double checked that she had indeed completed everything but the lesson. Her list for that day should have taken at least an hour and a half based on her past performance! So today, I decided to spy on her to see how she was getting things done so fast.

It turns out that Kirstie has discovered several time management “tricks” that have help her to leverage her free time and make the most of her summer vacation.

• Do the item you detest the most as early as possible.
• Do the easy stuff right away – the faster she can check stuff off of her list, the better.   She sees that the more things that get checked off right away helps her to see what is left and it motivates her to get those done too.
• Work expands to fill the time you allow for it, so give yourself less time.

There are several other time management nuggets that she has put into practice that have started me thinking about how I am managing time as well.   This morning, I decided to try her approach of “no schedule” and just work of my list of things to do.   My day is completely blank from now until 4:00pm. So far I have been up for just under two hours and I have managed to complete all of my household tasks, showered, handled all of my email and had breakfast.   Had I scheduled these items, I would have estimated all that to take about 3.5 hours.   The motivator in this process?  I have major updates to do on two client projects and I really enjoy my work.   I was driven to fly through the mundane stuff to get to the “fun” stuff.   The bonus is that now I can focus on my real work without being reminded of the boring household stuff every time I check my task list.   I don’t have anything hanging over my head for the rest of the day except the stuff I want to do.   I think I could get used to this…My head is spinning with ideas on this topic and I have some thoughts on how to make Kirstie’s plan of action work with everything from exercise to learning new skills.   I will gather my thoughts and post more on this topic soon.

To be continued…