Time management

The lad went grudgingly off to work this afternoon. Still working at the grocery store and counting the days until his resignation’s effective date—the day after Labor Day, I believe. The store is making good use of his time until he leaves. In fact, they’ve taken the liberty, a number of times in the last three weeks, to schedule him without his knowledge or consent. And then that phone call arrives inquiring after his whereabouts and off he goes in a high state of snit. But, he likes the people he works with, particularly the floor managers who he thinks have one of the most thankless jobs on the planet and he doesn’t want to cause them grief. When an employee on their shift doesn’t show up or calls in sick, they take the heat for it. Not exactly fair, but that’s the way it works. His job has been a good introduction to the politics of the work place.

He’ll be leaving his job with good feelings all around. He’s been told that the Gold Star will be affixed to his file—which means that any time he wants to come back during vacations or next summer, his application gets first priority and immediate acceptance.

His Dad and I both argued that he needed to keep his job for as long as possible. Aside from the earnings perspective, it was just good experience. But now that the new school year is about to start, it’s time to curtail some activities. His senior year is going to be a killer with four AP classes and a couple of required electives, including drama. Plus cross-country. It’s the drama class that will eat up way too much time in relation to its value, but so it goes. I don’t think he will see the light of day until he graduates now. It is going to be a time management tightrope.

But we’ve been practicing. The one thing that he has resisted is keeping a day planner. For reasons completely unknown, he has insisted that the day planner system doesn’t work for him. It wasn’t until about mid-way through last year that he began to concede that maybe it would work if he’d try it and maybe he needed to try it. And he did with remarkable success. It’s one of those things you can tell a person until you’re blue in the face, but until they discover it on their own, it’s all a lot of wasted breath.

So now that he’s figured out the merits of day-planning, we’re working on breaking a day into blocks for various activities. Instead of entering activities and appointments into designated time slots on his day-planner, he’s experimenting with blocking off chunks of time for the coming week. It seems to be a significant enough change in process that makes the whole thing click for him.

One of the things that helped was finding my old day planner from college (yes, I keep everything). I’ve been a time block chunker from way back. It was fun for him to go through my day planner for the last two years of college to see not only what I was doing, but how I did it—how I used the syllabi to plan a semester out in advance and how I blocked off time to accommodate regular assignments, research projects, work, daily life, studying for exams, and FREE TIME. Up until this point, his attitude toward a syllabus has been that it’s just another piece of paper to deal with. “No,” I said, “it’s a free time management gift from the teacher. Treasure it.”

So, I think he’s going into the new year with some new skills and I’m hopeful. We’ll see how it works out.