Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Systems for daily life
Before anything else, check the child actually knows what the homework is. Most homework goes missing at that first step, not at the effort step.
It might be on the board, on the school portal or in the planner with the teacher having glanced at it, and any of those is fine as long as it can be got at from home in the evening. Holding somebody to account for work they never successfully wrote down is unfair, and it also teaches nothing, because the part that failed was never the part you were cross about.
Qur’an and Sunnah
do not rush to recite before the revelation is fully complete (Quran 20:114). Waiting until you have the whole of something before acting on it is honoured, not treated as slowness.
فَتَعَٰلَى ٱللَّهُ ٱلۡمَلِكُ ٱلۡحَقُّۗ وَلَا تَعۡجَلۡ بِٱلۡقُرۡءَانِ مِن قَبۡلِ أَن يُقۡضَىٰٓ إِلَيۡكَ وَحۡيُهُۥۖ وَقُل رَّبِّ زِدۡنِي عِلۡمࣰ ا
exalted be God, the one who is truly in control. [Prophet], do not rush to recite before the revelation is fully complete but say, ‘Lord, increase me in knowledge!’
Qur’an 20:114read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review of mobile phone text messaging as a support for preventive health care is built around the same plain problem, which is making sure the right information reliably reaches the person who has to act on it. Everything downstream depends on that step. It is a review in health care rather than education, and it does not tell you which route works best for a school.
Vodopivec-Jamsek V, de Jongh T, Gurol-Urganci I, Atun R, Car J. (2012). Mobile phone messaging for preventive health care.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You cannot do the work if you never got hold of what the work was.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Read down a long to-do list and you will find things belonging to a person you were three years ago. Some of them were never good ideas. They got written down anyway.
Every small snag in a task is an exit. The forgotten password, the missing form, the bit where you are not sure what happens next: each one is a chance to say forget it, I will do this later.
Before you try to prioritise better, check whether there is any order in there at all. Plenty of people who feel stuck cannot say which of their jobs is genuinely required and which is merely wanted.