This week on Homeschool Highschool Podcast: Helping Teens Handle Procrastination-Special Replay.

Putting things off, especially things you don’t want to do, is a human thing. We all tend to do that. Sometimes for teens, because they have less experience in life, procrastination is one of the hardest things to conquer. Here are some tools for helping teens handle procrastination that you can share with them. 

The first thing teens need to know when they are procrastinating is that it really is part of the human condition. It is one of the parts of the human condition that we have to develop tools to conquer, though. 

Honestly, wouldn’t you rather just do nothing if you could? Or just entertain yourself all the time without doing other obligations? Sure, we all would, but that doesn’t make us happy in the end. And neither does procrastination.

When you sit down and talk it through with your teen, usually when they are procrastinating, they actually feel worse at the end of the day than they did at the beginning of the day.  That is because those things that need to get done just sit there in the back of their head trying to hide. As the neglected task is eating at their consciousness, their anxiety levels are going up. 

When you see your teen procrastinating, sit down and talk with them about what they are procrastinating on. It could be math lessons or research papers or cleaning up their bedrooms – whatever…

Once you have them talking about it, see if it is really procrastination at play here or if there is something else going on. It is a common thing for teenagers is to experience bouts of anxiety or depressive episodes. This is difficult for teens because they have no experience with handling those kinds of things. In these cases, procrastination is not really procrastination but stuckness caused by the tough emotions.

For a teen, anxiety or depression can look like:

There are many different causes for anxiety or depression:

It does not have to look like they are crying all day. In fact, it often does not.

When teens feel depressed or anxious, they cannot focus on their work very successfully (unless it is really easy academics). But it is hard for them to handle more difficult things, those things that take a lot of concentration or they don’t really like too much.

If your teen is experiencing anxiety or depression, have a gentle discussion about it with them. Then talk to the family doctor regarding what to do about it. See if they can connect you with a counselor. When teens get a few tools for recognizing what’s going on and managing these kinds of issues, they feel so much better about it. They will regain their energy to be successful at their schoolwork as well as the harder things in life. 

On the other hand, it is not uncommon for teens to actually be procrastinating for procrastination’s sake. In this case, try these tips.

Sometimes the procrastination is actually the teen feeling distracted. When distraction is happening:

Work on it together with your teen and come to an agreement. Try this: Help them list their next-day’s priorities each night before bedtime. (It is really hip these days for teens to literally write those priorities on a white board.) 

One of the definitions of maturity is the ability to delay gratification. The ability to wait to do what they really want to do is a good life skill. Help teens reward themselves when they finish their daily priorities. (Have the write the reward on their white board, so they can really celebrate when they accomplish their priorities.)

Many times, teens will feel overwhelmed. For They do not know where to even begin. You know they are feeling overwhelmed if you hear them complaining about their schoolwork or see them simply staring at a blank page. 

When you see your teen doing this, tell your teen to just close their eyes and scribble (or type) the letter R over and over again. Once that page is not blank anymore, things start to happen. The words start to flow, and the terror of the blank page or the blank screen is not so scary anymore. And just the act of doing some kind of writing will help your teen get started. 

Another thing that helps teens get over procrastination is knowing what to do next. According to research, it was discovered that when people know what they are going to do the next day before they go to bed, they will be less likely to procrastinate the next day.

For this, one thing that helps is to get a whiteboard and colored markers. Then have your teen write down what their tasks are for the next day every night at bedtime as well as the tasks they will be doing. 

For some reason, research shows that they are more likely to actually do those things that are written down (versus waking up and then deciding what to do without a plan). 

Having the paper or schedule in a colorful form or on a whiteboard they are going to do the next day really helps conquer some of the procrastination tendencies.

One thing that really helps teens overcome procrastination is to have an infrastructure for planning studying and projects. If you have teens who are using syllabi for some of their courses, you can help your teens use it to schedule backwards. 

To schedule backwards, you look at the syllabus. Then you divide lessons and projects up according to time (or a schedule) and put them on a calendar. This will help your teen see what is coming up and also co-ordinate all the work.

Teens who have a scheduler that they can use to know what is coming along as well as knowing when to work on things tend to do so much better at not procrastinating. This is because this gives them a neural infrastructure for time management. 

You can do this with different types of calendars, too, such as:

Of course, they could also use the calendars and the reminders on their phone. Our friend, Dr. Melanie Wilson from the Homeschool Sanity podcast has some planners for teens.

It is very doable to give teens these infrastructure tools and then watch them do less shutdowns from not knowing where to start.

Then the next thing that a lot of teens need to overcome procrastination is a growth mindset. This comes to play when teens don’t want to do something or something feels intimidating to them, but they get it done anyway because they know they will feel better once it’s done.

When things like this happen, teens can talk to themselves through not wanting to get something done. They can say something like:

I don’t like this, but I’m going to feel so much better when I hand this in completed.

Making a positive prediction on the other side of that helps the smart part of the brain turn on which is so important for teens to learn that skill. 

Another thing that helps teens overcome procrastination, especially on subjects that they do not like, is practicing a skill called pairing.To do this, take the thing your teen does not really like to do and pair it with something that they do like. 

For example, if they have favorite music they like to listen to, put that on in the background while they do their math. What this does is teaches the brain that this unlikable task is not not all bad. 

Another example is rewarding snacks to eat while they do schoolwork or finish a paper. 

Pairing can usually be used for helping teens handle procrastination by doing something they really don’t like doing, but not just teens – everyone can benefit from this!

Practice these skills to help teens handle procrastination with all tools by sitting down and talking to them about it. They can develop learned skills to overcome procrastination that they can carry all the way into adulthood. 

Join Vicki for tips on helping teens overcome procrastination.

Thank you to Richie Soares with Homeschool and Humor for creating this blog post!