Yesterday evening my daughter said to me, “I bet you $10 if I don’t get my homework done by 8 PM.” I accepted the bet and wished her good luck.

I was thinking she must have assessed her homework and known she could get it done in that time frame. Also she must know that she could procrastinate until after 11 PM if she did not implement some rule or constraint on herself. She actually used this bet to force herself to focus on task on hand.  Good try.

This exercise of self-control will make every parent smile like a baby. Things did not go as smoothly as we thought, though. She thought her algebra homework was posted on teacher’s website like it was used to be, but not yesterday. So she got on the internet, saying “I need to send an email to my classmate, asking her about our homework today.” And then she was on internet doing something else, waiting for email reply, with no idea of how long that waiting would be. At this moment, she asked for an extension as she had some legitimate reason. I told her to call instead of waiting for email reply. This she did and got what she needed to get work done. By the time she started doing the real work, it was a quarter till 8 PM.

What happened was she did not start doing homework immediately after dinner. If she started earlier she still had time to check with her classmate and found out any problem that might unexpectedly crop up.  Instead, she thought she could get the work done in less than an hour and was puttering away her time on the internet or something not related to homework until after 7 PM.

I gave her 30 minutes extension, but told her, “You would not be able to get any extension if it were real work.”  Still, I take it as a good beginning to the long battle against procrastination and a good effort in self-control and time management.