Why Your Child’s Planner Isn’t Working (and What to Try Instead)

 Have you ever bought your child a planner, calendar, or organizational system you were sure would help, only to watch it sit unused? 

That does not necessarily mean your child is lazy, unmotivated, or unwilling to get organized. The system may simply not fit how they think, work, and respond to pressure. 

In this episode, I share how I helped one student uncover the missing piece in her organization system and create deadlines that work with her strengths instead of against them. We also explore body doubling, shorter work sprints, internal motivation, and why personalized support is often more effective than handing every student the same planner. 

You’ll learn three questions you can ask your child to discover: 

•  When they are most productive 
•  What usually gets in their way 
•  What small strategy they can test this week 

The goal is not to correct or control your child. It is to stay curious and help them build a system they can use independently, especially as they prepare for college.
 
If you have an incoming college freshman, join the priority list for The Resilient Launch. I’ll soon invite 10 families into this personalized coaching program designed to help college freshmen manage their time, stress, responsibilities, and first-year transition with greater confidence and independence.

Find my podcast
Email me:  ccoufal@cynthiacoufalcoaching.com
Text me:  785-380-2064
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Transcript

   Have you bought a beautiful planner for your child or some amazing calendar, or maybe even did this for yourself? But have you created something for them or bought them something that you thought, "This is the way they're gonna get organized," and then it just sits there? Or maybe they opened it and tried it, and then things sort of fall off. Most of the time, this isn't about your child not wanting to be organized or ignoring you or not respecting you or not caring about it. It's possible that this isn't the right fit for their personality. I wanna talk to you today about how you find the right fit for the way they're going to be organized and the things that they need, and how I go about that with my own clients One of my clients will be a senior this year in high school, and last year she did, a hybrid way of doing high school, where she went to classes for... in the morning and had, I think, three classes in the morning, and in the afternoon she did online schooling for three or four classes. And she loved the freedom of this schedule. Her parents loved the freedom of the schedule. And everything seemed to be going well last year, and she and I were talking off and on about, you know, "What are you getting done? How are you organizing your afternoon versus your morning?" And we had some plans in place. We talked about what's the best way to schedule things and how I schedule things and how her parents schedule things, because they work from home. And then things were getting in the way, and she was getting behind, especially in the online classes, because they are a little looser. They have a little more freedom of when they need to be done versus the ones that are in person. So we talked about what was happening there, what were the barriers that were getting in the way, and we kinda just went back and forth between, "Okay, we're getting organized, and things are kinda going okay," and then they're falling apart, and continuing to talk and decide how all of that was working. And then Her parents and I talked about what was working, what wasn't working, and we decided to add body doubling. Now that, if you don't know what that is, that's where you either work in person with someone else, like you're both doing your own things and it's quiet, but you have a 25-minute time of focusing on the work and doing the work, and a five-minute break, and then focusing for 25 minutes. You can do that for 90 minutes, you can do it for an hour, you can do it all day. It just depends on, what you wanna do, what works for you. And so we were doing a combination of I body doubled with her online for an hour During the week, and then her parents were also body doubling with her at home, 'cause they have their own work to do, so she could be doing her work and they could be working alongside her. Or if you wanna try this, if you wanna try body doubling with your child, you could either... You could even be paying your bills, or you could even be scrolling on social media, as long as you're sitting quietly at, in proximity to your child as they work on things and you work on things, and you talk about what are you gonna work on, what are they gonna work on, and then during the break time you can talk about what you accomplished and what do you wanna accomplish in the next sprint of time. So we were doing that, and that was working okay, but there was still something missing. And this last week when we met, we finally figured out exactly what was missing. She's somebody who needs to be under pressure. Now, I don't... i've worked with kids for 35 years, and a lot of kids would tell me I'm just not gonna do anything until the pressure builds up because that's what motivates me is that pressure. I gotta get this done by tomorrow, I gotta..." And I, there's adults that have told me about the pressure thing before, and I get it. I probably work a little harder when there's pressure. But there are ways that you can build in your own deadlines where you don't have to wait till the last minute to have external pressure. You can create some pressure for yourself. And so that's what she and I finally figured out this week, that not only does she need to have a schedule, and everybody needs a routine. Some people need a routine a little bit more than others, but everybody needs it. And when we looked at her strengths from her CliftonStrengths, command, which I sometimes call control 'cause it, it's easier for my young people to understand. But command is one of her strengths, and that means that, and even though external deadlines motivate her in a way or pressure her, she also hates them because she wants to be in control of what goes on. So we talked a lot about how can she come up with her own deadlines that give her pressure, but she can set those deadlines in a, in smaller bits of time throughout the semester, throughout the amount of time she has to do a class, so that she feels the pressure and it's motivating to do things, but it's not something where you're waiting till the last minute. Because that can get really scary, and she's been doing that a lot over the last, the last few years of high school, where when the semester's getting close, that's when she really pours on the pressure, and it's worked, kind of, where she gets things done. But it's probably not to her best work, and it doesn't feel good to have everybody in the world mad at you at the end. Her parents were yelling at her. The teachers were getting mad. She was feeling bad about herself because she was waiting till the last minute but she was also waiting because that was the pressure. And so we started practicing how can you do your own pressure? And so for this next school year then, we'll be able to fit in that. And because I keep telling her, "You know, you've got one year left of high school to figure out how do all these systems work best for you, so when you do go off and be independent in college and have a lot of crazy free time, what can you do about that? How can you ha- You'll already have figured out how to have these, these specific deadlines for yourself." Now, this is great for her because this is how her strengths and her motivation and how she works best. But every kid is different, and so you might have had the perfect plan for one of your other kids, or you have the perfect plan that works for you, and then you try to teach it to your child, and they're like, "I hate this," or, "This doesn't work," or, "I feel confused," or, "I don't, I don't understand why this is a thing." And it's definitely a trial and error thing. As parents, we should be working on this forever, but especially all four years of high school, we should be helping and supporting our kids to figure out what is their specific unique way of doing things. And that's what I do in The Resilient Launch. I work with your child for three individual sessions where we really dig into what are their strengths, what are their values, skills, and interests, how do we weave that into what has been already working for them. And then we also look at what's not working and what can we do differently in that area. And the only way that your child can figure this out is through personalized support. It's not a generic plan that everybody gets. Everybody gets their own plan about how to get organized and how to stay motivated and how to be confident, and it is different for every kid. After 35 years of working with young people, I came up with a million different plans because it has to work for that particular child. And of course, there are things that can be similar through different plans. There can be things that you take from one plan and then change this other part about this other plan. Um, but it does take trial and error, and it does take trying it. And just because it sounds good, and just like with my client that I've had for s- for several years, so I know her really well, different than just doing some individual sessions and then some group sessions. But these things can still be figured out, but it does take time. It takes time to practice it. It takes time to figure out what feels good, what doesn't feel good. Let's take this part of this plan, and let's move it over to this other plan. And I love doing that with my clients. And so I would love for your child to be able to have this particular personalized support as they're going into this completely new transition in their lives For those of you who pressure works best, and I know, like I said, there's adults who need pressure, and if you know this about your child, that pressure and that I've-got-to-get-this-done-tonight is actually what seems to be motivating them, you might realize that, or you might talk with them about how shorter sprints of time are act- might be something that would be motivating to them. So when I was talking about the body doubling and the Pomodoro timer, and there you can actually get a timer, um, that are free as an app. You can just create your own timer. Maybe the 25 minutes focus time, especially if we're talking about a younger student, 25 of focus time might be a little long. If they have ADHD, maybe you need to make it shorter, maybe more like 15 minutes and then a break and then 15 minutes. They might need short deadlines, so help them when you can, when they're still at home, help them look at the whole picture, like what do you need to have done by the end of this week, this month, this semester, if sometimes there's semester-long projects, depending on the class. And then go back and reverse engineer, what do we need to do this week, this month, this quarter as we're preparing for this semester-long project or semester-long final that we have to study for? And how can we chunk that down into very doable, short-term things that we can work on and study and do, and maybe taking little notes along the way. And then when you have that big final project, that big final test that you need to study for, you can look at these small chunks of things and see how all of those can go together. So that's some things that you might realize about a child or yourself if you feel like you need pressure in order to be motivated to do something. And remember, I'm sure I've talked about this in other podcast episodes, but motivation does not come from something external like a deadline. It actually comes from inside of us. So if we are somebody who pressure helps push us, then what are some things that we can do it... with our thoughts and the way we feel inside and kind of come up with different things we could say to ourselves to feel that motivation so that we can consistently and daily work on things from a motivated feel, even though it's more crafted or created from inside instead of waiting for that, "Oh, I've got to get this done tomorrow"? Here are three questions that you can ask your child to help pinpoint some of these things as you're studying together and trying to figure out, uh, what works best. First, tell me about a time when you really got a lot of stuff done. What was happening? What were you thinking? What was the circumstances around getting a lot of stuff done and feeling good about it? And try to really be, just be curious, be a scientist about what was it about that situation, that time, that feel, what was going on around that time, and try to figure out what were some of those things that we could keep recreating over and over again that will keep that feeling going The next question is what usually gets in your way? What are the barriers? What happens? What is happening in your life when all of a sudden you're getting behind, when you don't wanna get out of bed, when you don't wanna do the work? What are you saying to yourself? What does it feel like? What's happening during that time? What are some things, just what are those different triggers and situations that get in your way? And then how can we plan around those? It's just like when you're going on a trip and you have your route figured out, and then, oh, there's road construction. Well, you don't just go home and say, "Well, forget it. I'm not gonna go." Well, maybe somebody does, but typically you're gonna find a different way around the situation. So okay, now we have road construction. What does that mean? We take the detour. We, um... You know, if we know about it ahead of time, maybe we plan extra time to go around this detour, do the things. And so that's what we do when we're trying to be motivated to get work done. What are the things that are gonna get in our way? Let's plan ahead of time. Okay, these things may happen or th- these are the things that have gotten in the way in the past, and then how do we work around that so those things don't keep getting in our way? And what is the smallest version of this that we can test this week? So what is one step in the direction of this new thing we found out when we asked these questions? We decided when this barrier comes up, we're gonna do this. What's one tiny way we could practice that this week, week? And what worked really well? What were you feeling? What were you thinking? Okay, how can we practice that thought and feeling today? How can we practice it this week? And what's one small way to do that so that when we do small, small steps, small goals, they're much more achievable and feel like, oh, we can handle this instead of, ugh, this is overwhelming and too much So parents, be curious, not corrective. So ask these questions. Really kind of get to know what, how, what makes your kid tick, what helps them to stay motivated, what gets them to get their work done, and then help them figure out the plan that's gonna go around them and not what works best for you. And it's not necessarily a planner or a certain kind of calendar or really any system that already exists. You might have to create a new system. Or maybe it is like a combination of something that exists that you could go purchase and adding in some of these other layers. But you just need to be curious about that. Uh, getting mad at your children for not being organized or not getting their work done does not help them to get better. Sometimes I think we see that punishment or yelling gets things done, but it's more out of a, um, maybe a fear or just an anger instead of the real reason or the real way that we want them to get through these things. Because we don't want them to have to be angry to get things done or afraid to get things done. We want them to do it from inside so that when they are adults and they're in college, they are doing it without us having to micromanage that, and we really can't at that point. So we've gotta figure out ways to help them see what the plan can look like and help support them in that before they actually go there. I am inviting you, if you are a parent of a soon-to-be college freshman, or maybe they've already gone. I have heard of some students that are already there. But if you are a parent of a college freshman, I invite you to get help with this whole system. Like, how do I get my child to get things done and be organized and get through that first year successfully? Because it is a huge transition. It's a huge transition for both of you, but it's definitely for them, and I would love to be the person to help your child and you through this, this transition and help them to be as successful as they can be. And your child doesn't have to do this alone. I think you've probably figured out in your own life that when you've gotten support from someone, or listened to a podcast, or read a book, or figured out something and started trying a new way that makes you finally more successful or more organized or whatever, you feel so much better, and I can help your child do that. Sometimes they need to hear it from someone other than their parent, and I'm glad to be that person. And then I can let you know what we're working on in all of our different sessions so that you know what to reinforce or to, what kind of questions to ask them when you do as it was with them. Look for the, the priority list link, because I am soon to be inviting 10 families to work with me, 10 college freshmen, and I want you to be one of them. So definitely get on the list so I, so you will be the first to know when this is opening.