Over the past 5 years I have seen more and more athletes in particular really struggle with managing workload during school years. The demands on young athletes at school is growing, as more people and events compete for their time.
So, what suffers the most with time management? In my opinion, people are too quick to overload themselves with a whole bunch of training sessions, work, game time and then trying to maintain a study load on top of that. This really just comes to young athletes trying to do everything, but doing nothing particularly well. This leads to frustration and a sense of failure, especially for high achieving students.
In my opinion it is really important to make sure there is balance at a young age, and teaching the value of balance between the sporting, academic, social spiritual and emotional spheres of development.
So, if your son or daughter is really struggling to get things done on time then in my experience the best way to manage this is to sit down with them and work on setting specific and targeted goals for them to work towards weekly.
The Olympic Movement’s website has a really good part about time management. I have included the link into this article so you can go and download some of the short fact sheets that give helpful hints and tips on managing time as a young athlete.
http://www.olympic.org/content/olympic-athletes/athletes-space/tips/time-management/
One of the fact sheets is specifically about procrastination, which is a good sign of inadequate stress management and also a sign of not having a clear plan to work towards.
http://www.olympic.org/Documents/Elite_Athletes/STOP_PROCRASTINATING.pdf