Me and my kiddo

Me and my kiddo

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

GTD for Kids: Part II

I first wrote about GTD for Kids about three and half years ago and we've done lots of tinkering in that time!  We've had picture schedules / calendars, simple lists, and lots of little tweaks.  The file box is forgotten, for now, but we've gradually honed a weekly list that includes all my son's various actions and... it's now his to manage!  That's the biggest advance now, he manages his own todo list and tweaks it as he finds necessary.  At ten, he's also quite willing to use computer tools to change it into a format that appeals to him.  I was impressed when he used a mind map tool to change his print list into this:



It's got everything from cleaning his room and showering to school work and various activities with Mom and Dad.  He's been using this for about a month successfully.  He loves that he prints it himself each week and makes his choices each night with the time frame of the full week in mind.

We've got two things that we want to implement soon to give him a more complete, effective system- an inbox and a calendar.  My husband is going to set up a calendar for my son so that I can still keep it on my computer, but it will sync to his computer and he can look at that each week when deciding how to budget time.  It's also something he could print independently if he wanted.  While this has been awesome for organizing time, he's pretty messy when it comes to paper.  So... secondly, we're figuring an inbox is a good first step for paper management (and he could add "empty inbox" to his mind map).  He doesn't like missing pieces of paper, but he's not buying into any kind of file system... yet!

So... this process is intriguing!  We're just gradually helping him develop good habits and tools as he finds a need to get things done :)  Cool!


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