Your teen lives in the modern world. Between phone calls, texting, email, instant messages, Facebook, and any other number of social networking opportunities that distract her, she has to learn to establish boundaries for herself in order to get any work done at all.
Do Not Disturb
When she’s hammering out a paper or other project, there should be none of this electronic interruption until she’s finished, and for good reason. Setting aside these distractions is sort of like hanging an e-version of the “do not disturb” sign. And now I’m going to become very unpopular with your teen—and so will you, if you take my advice!
Unplug the Internet cable during her computer time and turn off her cell phone, if she has one.
Yes, unplug. This will make it impossible to go online or get interrupted by a text message while she’s working on an essay or report. If she needs to do research online, have her separate the research process from the writing process. Let her work online . . . and then simply unplug the cable when her research is complete.
What’s the Big Deal?
When your student tries to work at the computer while chatting with friends via instant message and e-mail, she loses the ability to focus and concentrate. As a result, the quality of her work suffers. In addition, she’ll require more time to finish the project. For one, the interruptions themselves take time. But more importantly, these breaks—no matter how short in duration—require her to keep refocusing when she finally returns to the task at hand.
I regularly experience this myself. I have two tasks open on the desktop, my email open on the laptop, and a barrage of projects stacked on my work surface. When I flit back and forth among them like a restless butterfly, I often close out my day feeling like I got absolutely nothing accomplished. Instead, I end up with myriad loose ends dangling everywhere and just as much on my to-do list as when I woke up.
But when I commit myself to one project at a time, visit my inbox a few times a day instead of several times an hour, and steer clear of both Facebook and the phone during those designated working hours, I am so much more productive as I pick off a whole bunch of little tasks (or take a nice chunk out of a bigger project). The sense of accomplishment is huge for me—and your teen can experience this too.
Goodbye to Multitasking
Making electronic access difficult (or impossible) forces your student to pour all her concentration and effort into her writing. This ability to separate work from play is of the utmost importance at college where she won’t have your help making such wise choices. In your “home training center,” once your teen figures out how much easier it is to write a paper in an uninterrupted chunk of time, she’ll may never go back to multi-tasking again!
That’s it for now—I’m off to take a dose of my own medicine.
Please do not disturb.
. . . . .
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College prep 101: Creating a quiet workspace
