Executive Function Help: Part Three - Teaching Kids to Manage Their Email Accounts

As we all remain on "lock down" and kids and adults alike are working from home, we continue with Beth Guadagni's timely series on helping your children (and maybe yourself) organize their digital lives. 

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Establish Order
Many adults lack strategies for managing their email inboxes, so you may be learning alongside your student here! Virtually everyone who has an email account finds themselves flooded with incoming messages. Important emails get lost in the clutter, and many students don’t notice these critical messages when they come in and can’t find them easily later.

To solve this dilemma, help your student create folders for his email. Just like when he organized his files, he’ll want one for the current school year with a folder for each subject within it. Within the folder for that school year, he should also create a folder for each school activity he gets emails about (Cross Country, Band, etc.). If he gets personal email through this account, he should create a Personal folder as well, and he may want one for extra-curricular activities, too (Ski Team, Community Theater, etc.). And he’ll want at least one folder for older emails; if it’s unlikely that he’ll need to look back through them, he may want just one called Archive. Otherwise, he can create one for each year.

Clear out the Inbox
Explain to your student that the goal is to have almost nothing in his inbox. (More on that later.) First, starting with the oldest files, your student should delete anything and everything that he will never need again. This includes all advertisements, every message from Google informing him that someone logged in to his account from a new device, etc. As with organizing his digital files, this could take a while. Encourage him to do a little each day. Because this kind of purging is a fairly mindless process, some kids can do it while watching TV, riding in the car, etc. (Others will need more focus; you know your child best.) To be frank, most of us never need to reference old emails again. However, you never know when something from the past will turn out to be useful, so err on the side of caution when it comes to deleting.

Now that all the junk is gone, your student should categorize older emails by making use of his folder system. Show him how to drag emails into the right places, starting with the oldest ones first. Again, this will likely take some time. He should keep going until he has only a handful of emails left in his inbox. Aim for ten (or fewer). Everything that’s left should be considered “active.” For example, the email from his math teacher reminding the class that they have a test in two days is still active (though in two days it won’t be). The email from his debate coach that he needs to write a reply to is still active. The packing list for the overnight field trip last month is not active and should be moved.

Maintain Order
Believe it or not, there is a magic formula for ensuring that important emails never go unnoticed and that your student doesn’t read, then forget about, an email (and this formula may just help some adults you know, too…) He should never have more than about ten emails in his inbox at any time. Ideally, he should have fewer than that. His inbox can double as a to-do list if he manages it that way. Here’s how: Each time he reads a new email, he should do one of three things:

1) Delete it immediately – Spam should not languish in his inbox. This is the easiest action.

2) Take care of it and archive it – Write a response, download the attachment, add a date to his calendar, then move the email into the right folder. Anything he’s taken care of should not sit in his inbox.

3) Keep it in his inbox because further action is needed, but he’s not going to do it right now.

Old habits, as they say, die hard, and your student may need many weeks of supported, daily practice. He’ll need to be reminded to purge and categorize. He will likely need help determining what can wait and what should be taken care of now. But he’ll likely start to feel less anxiety about what’s overlooking, motivating him to want to maintain the order he’s created.

Coming up in our next and final post in this series, a grab-bag of topics: First, you’ve got great systems – how do you make sure they actually get used? We’ll also cover tips for minimizing internet distractions and staying on top of the many logins students are expected to manage.

Executive Function Help: Teaching Kids to Manage Their Digital Files

Back on March 11, which now seems a long time ago, we introduced a series of posts by Beth Guadagni on executive function and how kids can manage their digital lives. Now that students are working from home, keeping their digital materials organized is more important than ever. So we are picking up this series and hope that it helps your students stay on track. As Beth noted during her introductory post on this subject "having a sense of control over their time and materials lowers anxiety". And we can all benefit from a bit less anxiety in our lives.

Teachers’ increasing reliance on cloud storage like Google Drive means no more lost papers – hooray! Your student can now access assignment sheets and submit work online. But working from the cloud can mean misplaced files. Some kids have even more difficulty with digital file storage than they did with papers because they often use the same account throughout their career at a school or in a district. That means that, in theory, if a high school senior was assigned her district email address when she was in, say, fifth grade, she could be searching through seven years’ worth of disorganized digital files. Not pretty.

Here are some tips for helping your student resolve the digital chaos. Remember: It’s almost certainly going to take a while for your student to do all this independently, so provide patient support for as long as she needs.

Establish Order 

A student shouldn’t store work on both a computer’s hard drive and in a digital cloud because it can be hard to remember which of the two places she used last. Ask her to commit to one. Once she’s committed, first thing’s first: Create a system for a student’s existing files and help her put things where they belong.

She should begin by creating one folder for the current school year and one for each previous year from which she has documents saved. If she gives the file the name of each grade (e.g. 8th, 9th, 10th, etc.), she should be sure to arrange them in reverse-chronological order so that her most current grade shows up on top.

Now, within the folder for the current year she should create one folder for each of her classes. If she includes a number to correspond with which period she has each class (e.g. 1. Biology, 2. Spanish, etc.), the folders will be organized in the order of her schedule and not alphabetically.

If you really want to take things to the next level, most file storage systems will allow users to choose colors for each folder. Pick a color for each subject, then give your student colored pens, folders, and binder dividers to correspond with her digital organization system. For example, if she chooses green for biology, the divider for the biology section of her binder could be green, too. She could also use a green pen to put biology assignments into her planner (or choose green for biology work she enters into her electronic calendar). This color-coding process can help her make sense of her schedule and materials at a glance. Better yet, the mental process of selecting the correct color each time she saves information and writes down a due date enforces the categorization of the different parts of her schedule, helping her brain to be as organized as her planner and files.

Now that she’s got her system in place, it’s time to organize her files. This could be a multi-day process if she’s got several years’ worth of documents willy-nilly, and that’s OK. Anything from previous years can get dragged into the appropriate folder for that year; there is usually no need to organize them further. With documents created during the current school year, your student should take the extra step of dragging files into each class’s folder. Show her how to arrange her files by date in reverse, so that the most recent documents are at the top of the list.


Maintain Order
If you’ve gotten this far with your student, you’ve almost certainly encountered an alarming number of documents named “Untitled.” This frustrating situation is a great learning opportunity. Point out to your student that she has open each of these documents to determine what it is before she can put it in the right place. This is a waste of time, and after having to do this over and over she’ll likely become a believer in titling documents. The next step is to make titling a habit. A good practice is to prompt your student to title each new document immediately upon creating it, before she begins working on it. If she uses Google Docs, she can type the title into the body of the document, then click on the field for the name of the doc and the title she entered will auto-populate, so she needs to type it only once.

Each time your student creates a document, slide show, etc., she’ll need to drag it into the correct folder. But for kids with weak EF, streamlining processes is important. If she uses Google Drive she can eliminate this step and still stay organized. Show her how to create the new document from within the correct folder. Next time she needs to type a reading response for a novel, for example, ask her to open the folder for that school year, then for Language Arts. Now, when she clicks “New,” the document will automatically be saved to that folder. (She can, of course, move it later if she accidentally creates it in the wrong place.)

Step One: Complete! Now that your student can find what she needs on her hard drive or in her cloud storage, check back for our next post about how to manage email.