I attended The Executive Function Online Summit organized and run by Seth Perler and it was very interesting and helpful. Most of the speakers spoke about strategies to improve executive function in children and adolescents. One speaker, Ms. Sarah Ward, had an interesting view about executive functioning. According to her, “the heart of executive function is this ability to pre-imagine and literally see yourself moving through space and time to achieve a goal…”
For instance time management involved “mental spatial time travel” the capacity to envision yourself going from point A to point B to point C. For example, budgeting your time between doing a math assignment, walking the dog, washing and cutting vegetables which mom will cook later and finishing one-hour online lecture for history – all to be done in 2 hours.
Using mental spatial time travel the student imagines her/himself going from point A (doing the math assignment) to point B (finishing the 1-hour online lecture for history) to point C (walking the dog) to point D (preparing the vegetables for mom). Visualizing (or pre-imagining) what he/she will be doing may make him/her realize that there is not enough time to do all these. The student can then revise his/her plans so that he accomplishes most, if not all, of his/her goals within the time he has (either do things faster or eliminate one activity & schedule it for another day).
