2025 REEL Strengths Fair, How to build a "can’t help but thrive" task management system w/ Sam Young

Hold on, this always turns off. It's — wait, when it pops up down here we'll be good. Wait for it. Yep, okay, okay. Clap your hands one time if you can hear me. Clap your hands two times if you can hear me. Clap your hand three times if you're excited to be here. Yeah! Please welcome the amazing Mr. Sam Young, founder and mentor at Young Scholars Academy.

Thank you Emmy, you didn't plan that by the way. I was nervous — you did a great job. Thank you Emmy. Let's give it up for Emmy. Okay so everyone, welcome, thank you so much for being here.

Now the first thing is you might be seeing this like wait, AI? I've added that but we don't have to go AI if you don't want to, so don't be — don't be alarmed. My name is Mr. Sam. We're going to be exploring how we can build task management systems for our bright kiddos who are struggling to get things done.

Now raise your hand if you are a parent or a kiddo who struggles to get things done. Raise your hand if you are a parent and you have a kiddo who struggles to get things done. All right, so that's a lot of us. Okay, excellent. Well I'm happy to have you all here.

We are going to be exploring this from from a variety of different lenses and we're going to go on a journey. One secondy, let me get back to you. Okay, first we're going to explore executive function skills. We're going to be talking about what are these things, and many of you are here so you might know. Number two, we're going to talk about how can we make a system. And then number three, I'm going to share a way that you can implement this system and help your child and help yourself go and thrive and get things done that you hope to do. And then I have a little bonus for those of you who stay till the end, which is a class and resource demo so you can see how to build this thing and have me help you out.

Did you have a quick question? Yes, I pretty sure I learned most of this in Young and in also ading and it was very helpful so — okay Emmy says it's helpful so you should listen to me.

Okay so we're going to begin here. Executive function skills are something — it's a very attractive buzzword. It's thrown around a great deal, right? Also AI as well, so I thought why not combine these two things.

The thing is this: a lot of our students don't understand that executive function skills exist and they spend most of their lives feeling like they're stupid or that there's something wrong with them or that they can't get things done. And the big focus of the day — do you feel the energy shift right there because it resonates with you? — we're going to spend the day separating intelligence and executive function skills and figure out how we can support the intelligence area and build the executive function skills around that.

So most people don't trip and fall into this field by accident. We don't wake up and say I'm gonna make up tons of money and go into education, but we're here because we care and we're here because it's deeply personal. I know for Gil, for everyone here, myself included, we're here because we have these differently wired brains and we were seeking answers and community and trying to help others along the way, right? So this is very personal for me.

I at a young age was diagnosed with ADHD and spent most of my life really struggling. And it wasn't until I got to grad school that I learned about executive function skills and realized that I could be bright and not turn my work in and that those two can coexist. And it gave me this great freeing sensation of "I'm okay and I'm just not good at these skills" versus "I'm not okay," right? And that's really my big takeaway that I want to start with today so we can enter that conversation on the same page.

Having a debate background, I have to always start with definition. Number 10 is not accurate actually — there's maybe 13 executive function skills, people will disagree, but I just like the picture. But if you think of executive function skills, this is the — put your hands on the front of your head right here — this is your prefrontal cortex. You've heard this before. This is the essentially like the air traffic controller of your brain, right? It tells you what to do in what order, when to do it, and when not to do it. And we know our brains develop back to front, right? So for our young kiddos actually don't have much executive function skills at at all. We're going to talk about that in a moment.

This is things like working memory, right? Holding multiple numbers and things in our head or tasks. And we compensate for this, right? You might have a kid who maybe — or you — walk back to a place where you had a thought to try to remember it, right? Or you like try to go back into the shower and you're like "what was that thing?" right? This is an example of like trying to like hack your working memory. Time management, perseverance — so Emmy I'm gonna have to few questions a little bit later, I'm sorry, but I will call on you when I have a good moment, okay? I promise you that.

So again, our brain back to friend development — here's the thing, and maybe heard it before: when does this part of our brain, this prefrontal cortex, develop? Roughly 25, 26? Yeah, it's around 27 or so. For neurodivergent people it's maybe 30% delayed. So I say this to say we're kind of bananas, right? Because we're like, we know this yet we ask kids to do things that are not realistic, right?

You say you K up to their room, they're like "hey do me a favor, go make your bed, come downstairs," and they go up into the room and they're like "Legos" and they're like "this amazing world I was building," right? Or all these things. There's so much happening in here and it is very difficult. So I just — I want to start with this because again, this human brain, this frontal brain is not developed in your kids. And when you look at your kids' time blindness, it is very real. I mean the kids at the age of like 10 or so can only see minutes into the future. So when we're like "why aren't you thinking about the consequences of this action in one month from now?" it's like they cannot do that.

So but we're kind of bananas. Sticking with the aviation metaphor: where's the cockpit on the sucker? It's this little thing here, right? And what's a control the whole thing? Right here, right? And that's your prefrontal cortex, right? This is your frontal part of your brain. It's a tiny little piece that controls the whole entire vessel, right? And that's why this stuff is so fascinating, interesting and important.

So I want to kind of start from this headspace today. You've maybe heard the Dr. Ross Greene quote before: "our kids do well when they can." We're here today to learn about systems and assume the best, right? We're assuming that our kids are doing well when they can, and if they cannot it's because they cannot, not because they choose not to or they want to defy you or you know they're mad at you so they're going to, right? It's because they cannot. So we're going to be building systems from this place and from this vantage point.

I also want to challenge you to open up your senses because the same kid who's "lazy" and doesn't turn in their work is playing a video game dying a thousand times and then put persevering and beating the boss. And if you remember, perseverance was one of these, right? So it's where you look. The same kid who doesn't turn in homework is trying a you know a kick flip a thousand times and bleeding from the shins until they get it. They have perseverance, they have stick-with-it-ness, they have obsession. It's just not in the seat in the classroom where we're looking, right?

So when we talk about executive function skills, I want you to also approach it from a place of curiosity and openness because guess what? A lot of the times they just don't care. The skills might be there and guess what else? It's way more fun to develop them when they do care. I'm never read a book until I started a virtual school, not all the way through. I have dyslexia and ADHD and it was very hard for me. And then I was like "I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to start a school. I don't know how to do that. Books will tell me the answer," so I read, right? Obviously this is an oversimplification, but what what changed? Not me, I just got interested and it became relevant and it became authentic. So if you have a kid who wants to start a podcast or a a streaming channel or whatever, that's where you find the executive function skill growth and then we translate it. Don't throw an agenda book at them — whatever you do — and say "don't forget your math homework," right? I know this is what we've done and I get it, but we're gonna talk about a better way.

So task management specifically — you've seen that executive function is is a wide umbrella. This includes things like emotional regulation. This is why executive function skills have become such a buzz word, but it's also dangerous. They just talk broadly about them because working memory and emotional regulation could not be further apart. So today we're going to go into a very specific journey talking about the three steps to task management because this is really the core of probably what brought you here: you have a bright kid, they're not getting things done.

There are three levels: Number one, we're going to talk about quick capturing. Number two, we're going to talk about planning our week or our month, which is ultimately prioritizing. And then number three, we're going to talk about you know the tires meet the road, right? The the doing, the daily planning, okay? And I'm going to give you some concrete examples and some resources along the way.

So my goal is a Frankenstein system. Any Mel Brooks fans here? No? Come on. Young Frankenstein — that usually kills. Let me go back. You guys just laugh so — oh you guys. Mel Brooks, am I right? Young Franken — the Frankenstein example is this: it's letting go of the how, okay? The way that you make a color-coded calendar on a whiteboard on your refrigerator might not gel with what your kid needs. And guess what? Not everybody's going to do well with an agenda book, okay? So again, it's letting go of the how and focusing on what are the skills. And it's a Frankenstein system — it's different for everyone.

I want to enter this conversation with learning styles. We all have different brains. This is overused and misused but it is a good point to start because it gets our kids reflecting on their learning — meta cognition, thinking about thinking. The agenda book kills the conversation, but asking your kid how they prefer to write down a thought they have in the middle of the night? That's a good one, right? So get them to think: are they verbal? Are they visual? Do they need to track things? Emmy here has built an amazing task management system and it has gone through different phases, and Emmy's a very visual thinker, so Emmy's needed to create a system that is very visual. It's very different from someone who's more linear, right? So it's different for everyone, and that's so very important.

Number one, again, is we start with the quick capture, okay? And we need to show our kids how — and again, it's not "right your math work or down because you got to do it," right? It's something they care about: "Hey, you know that podcast you want to create? What if you had an amazing idea in the shower or what if you have an incredible idea when we're at the grocery store? How are you going to remember that?" right? It all of a sudden it's authentic, it's relevant, and they're going to want to think of a way. "God, that's a real problem, I haven't thought about that," right? They have to solve for it. So we have to have ways to capture and it can be very flexible.

Any Harry Potter fans here? Okay, you know what this thing is. What's this thing? What's it called? The Pensieve. This is the Pensieve, right? It's Latin for "think." JK Rowling created this idea for Dumbledore to have this basically like a cauldron, kind of like a almost to pull thoughts out of his head and put them in an external hard drive, right? That's the idea. Our kids need to see this. They don't understand an agenda book — that's something they're being told to do, right? That's that's a demand. But having a place to capture your thoughts? Well that might help me do what I want to do, right? And everybody needs one, and creative people have them.

Sorry, I just touched the microphone. So giving examples like this, even silly ones, can go a great distance because we need external hard drives. We need places to capture because guess what? The busy minds are also the most susceptible to dopamine peaks and troughs, right? Really big idea, it feels urgent, kind of leap frog logic. We forget where we were going. If we can have a space to write it down and create a system, we can always capture these things, we can make sense of them later, and that's where we begin.

I think it's really important to make it flexible, and this is where I also make it very fun. I share really awkward, uncomfortable things. Like I'm like "guys, I have a remember" — my example for a quick C — I want to put you on the spot. What do I have in my shower?

"Have a like whiteboard thing in the shower."

See, kids remember that stuff. Thank you Emmy. I have a whiteboard in my shower because — raise your hand — you have great ideas in the shower and then you forget when you get out? That happen? I'm not alone. There's psychological — okay, when you're in the shower there is a sensation, a strong stimulus — warm water — it gets your brain flowing. When it stops, those thoughts often stop and they code switch: there's a next task — get my towel, I have a I have a meeting soon, breakfast, right? So it's important that we have systems and overshare with students about different things we do, like having a whiteboard in your shower because guess what? They might have really good thoughts there too. Or having a sticky note with a little light above it next to your bed so you can write thoughts in the middle of the night. Raise your hand if you have great thoughts in the middle of the night? I have tons of great thoughts in the middle of the night, right? And having a place to capture those and then not have them keep you up, right? The difference between having a system where you can just say "write it down and then go back to bed" versus like spiraling about "what if I forget" and so forth. It gives you grace.

Having a system that is anchored is so very important too, and I I challenge students all the time. I'm like "I'm going to give you $5 later, you just need to write this down and you need to remind me on Friday so I don't forget to pay you," right? It's it's a challenge, it's fun. Send me a meme at a certain time, right? We want to see if they can do something that they care about. It has to be anchored. It can't be on like the back of a bill or a random sticky note that gets thrown away. It has to all come together. So when we quick capture, we're telling kids they can have different systems for different settings and then it needs to come together. It needs to be anchored.

Additionally, it's going to be different for different learning situations. If you are homeschooled like Emmy — you do not necessarily need a system that travels very well — go to YSA too. If you go to school in person, you need a flexible travel system, right? So we want to think about our needs. I tell students all the time, "I had this really elaborate cool system during COVID, also didn't go out," right? So things change, our systems do too.

The next step after we have a quick capture system — this by the way can be getting your kid to reflect on their needs: maybe they voice record thoughts or they speak into an AI model or they have a whiteboard or sticky notes — then we have to prioritize and plan. And this is really where the higher order thinking comes in. And by the way, I make this reference all the time, but kids actually don't know what this is anymore — we've gotten that old — but we don't want to play whack-a-mole, right? We want to be — I have to then explain whack-a-mole is. I know you know what it is now because I had to tell you, but the idea is that most of us, especially again dopamine chasers, ADHDers, ADHDers, dyslexics, we're chasing dopamine a lot of times and we're chasing urgency. We live in a very urgent world, right? Slack, emails, text messages, social media, right? It's always "now, now, now" and it totally makes you forget what you were doing. And if you're neurodivergent, you're extremely susceptible to these dopamine pumps. Everything feels really urgent and it's way more fun or rewarding subconsciously than deep work, which is maybe the most important work.

So we need to have a way to focus ourselves and to involve our kids in the process because a lot of times they're not. And this is as simple as if you're homeschooling and you're planning the week, involve your kid in the process and explain why you chose certain tasks earlier in the week and what do they think about the order, right? What are the outcomes? What are the inputs? It's like programming. We want to have ways for our kids to have novelty, to have excitement, and but most importantly to do really cool stuff.

I think of like clickbait here, you know? Like when you're talking to young people about it, it's like "five college secrets that schools don't want you to know about," you know? It's like really edgy stuff, but it's true. Like Emmy and the other kids in our program are learning graduate level systems and it's fun and it feels forbidden. But guess what? It should not be. You should not have to struggle for 20-some years and then learn what a Kanban is. "Oh, this is helpful," right? You should learn that when you're five.

So the first thing that we do is we help our students understand the entirety. They capture completely and they have to understand what are all the pieces.

There's a lot of text on a couple slides — I'm sorry, this is a 90-minute talk that I got down to like 45, so bear with me. Catch the recording after if you're watching the recording — hi! So number one is we have to break it down and make sure we understand it completely. Many of our kids come home and they have like no resources that they need — they needed a poster, they needed a book, they didn't — there wasn't foresight put into it, and that's because they don't have that. So we need to have systems to help our kids check in: what do you need for this assignment? What will this require from you, okay?

I laugh — I did this talk like a month ago or so and this woman said "every picture I took is like a the screen in your head do blur." I just saw a bunch of people taking a photo because I walk — the idea is that you're getting all the the pieces, you're getting a full picture, you're putting all of that information together, and we're we're walking through our students.

Here's an example: a lot of us are taught just to write "a assignment." It's so ethereal and abstract it doesn't get done. It's depressing — you have to write a paper. You can work on it every day and it's still "you have to write a paper," right? It doesn't get done. But if we can help break down projects into milestones, if we can start to introduce this language — this is what we do. I mean we're in Silicon Valley, right? This is like lean manufacturing, Kanban bonds, like work sprints and stuff like that. Anybody who who lives locally you — what are those little things called when you like agile results, right? What are you doing? You're taking big projects and breaking them down into actionable steps. It sounds silly but we assume our kids can do this and don't explain it, right?

That's as simple as saying "hey, when you're going to write a paper, there's actually going to be several milestones. You're going to need to research, outline, write, and and revise. Each one of those you could have the this on your to-do list for ages and not get it done. Each one of those has small tasks. You can get these done all day and guess what? Body's in motion stay in motion — it's physics 101. Get your kid moving. This is so daunting — this is like a big colossal cliff hanging over and you're living in the shadow looking up like "God help me." This is easy: "I have to have a meeting? Oh I did it, okay." Momentum, keep going, it feels good, right? And there's a difference.

So if we can help our kids understand this language — projects, milestones, tasks — and then we can get them going, get some momentum.

The next thing that we do is ranking. This is not intuitive. We write things down and then we just kind of go. And I know some of you were saying like — raise your hand if you've tried this before and hasn't worked out with your child — ranking tasks: "like we have five things to do, we're going to do this, this, this," okay? If this has not worked out for you, I recommend flipping the script. It's a heck of a lot easier to determine what's least important than it is what's most important, right? If there's five things on your list, choosing one might cause analysis paralysis, but identifying five is probably pretty easy, and then we might as well pick four, three, two, and then one, right? You see the difference? We're just approaching from another side.

So our idea is to break down the tasks into smaller pieces and then we rank them in order, and we get our kids thinking about kind of bigger picture stuff. Interesting: why do you put that as a three or a four? What are the different criteria? And we can introduce things like what's the outcome, right? Are you familiar with the Pareto principle? Vilfredo Pareto, this Italian thinker in the 18th century, had this thought that 20% of the plants were creating 80% of the vegetables in the garden, or 20% of the inputs at work create 80% of the outcomes, right? So getting our kids to even think about that: "Hey, I know that you put like that math book reading as your number one, but I also know that there's this big math project that's worth like 40% of your grade and that's number five. What's going on? If we did that one thing tonight, that might be a major win. It might move the needle more than all the other stuff," right? So having these kinds of involvement.

This is another one. This is a famous quote from Mark Twain. I think Mark Twain's one of those people who gets like kind of like a Confucius or someone — we probably give them too many quotes like they probably didn't say all these things. Well like I don't know who said it — Twain, Confucius?

"Yes Emmy, I remember when we did the eating live frogs. What is the eating live frogs method?" "Well it's when you kind of start with like the worst things work like say somebody really really really doesn't want to write an essay, then they write their essay first so that it's not like 'and they like oh to write this essay' and then they can just kind of done with it and then everything else feels a lot easier."

So this is proof this stuff works. Emmy took this class over a year ago — go! — and it works. These things stay with kids and and there's an understanding. You're not just blindly working. So many of the times we just get a checklist and we go down it, but if you involve your kids in that process, they're going to learn so much more.

The the next thing is then we get very specific, okay? We create deadlines. Now there are going to be two different groups here: some kids are going to be overwhelmed and triggered by deadlines and time pressure and that will not work for them — that's important to know. There will be other kids who like — raise their hand — maybe they're a bit competitive and they enjoy urgency. I do time boxing every day. I love it because if something happens — I get a Slack message or whatever — and then I look back and I'm like "oh I was working on this from this hour to this hour and I better get it done because I only have 15 minutes," right? My dopamine kicks in, I get laser focused. So sometimes scheduling work blocks, having deadlines, right? Breaking these things up — we're familiar with this, but we don't explain it to our kids. It sounds silly but we assume they get it and they don't. We need to make it ever so obvious and connect it to their interests, okay?

And then once we know this stuff, once we have this macro overview, then the Frankenstein part comes in. We introduce all the bits and pieces of the system and we let them try it on and see what fits, and we say it's just trying. So things like an Eisenhower Matrix where we're looking at urgency versus importance — looks like this, right? High — this is high level stuff and it's authentic. I'm like "you guys know President Eisenhower, you know, was a general who led the west through World War II? Yeah, this system was good for him, so it's it's good enough for me," right? That's authenticity. This isn't just an agenda book with your school's mission statement on it. This is a system that a president used to lead the country, right? And it's very visual and it can be tactile. Your kids can move sticky notes around on it or use an app or something like that, right? Not everybody even knows this exists.

There's also things like this. This is the Moscow method where you have must, should, could, want, okay? And it can look like this. Again, for visual people, tactile people, this is way easier. Maybe making a one through 10 to-do list is really overwhelming, but if I can gamify it, I can try to like get this stuff done — "I'm gonna get my must done, then I'm gonna be free this weekend" — like that feels really good. We inevitably love games, right? Humans love to play. We know play-based learning is one of the best kinds of learning, and we know that learning is very natural because we love to play. The same can happen with task management. There's no reason that it can't, and I know you're thinking that I'm maybe a bit nuts, but it's actually really fun when you let it be.

Anybody here play Duolingo? Okay, okay, case in point, right? What is that? Gamified learning. How many of you log on because you're like "my streak," right? My wife has like a meltdown if she doesn't do a New York Times crossword puzzle. It's like 2 AM and she's like "I got to get it done before bed. I've got 392 days." I'm like "proof," okay? We love getting things done, we love games, we love gamified learning. Make it happen for task management at home. It can happen for chores, it can happen for school work, it can happen for your real work. You get rewards, streaks, trophies, stuff like that.

Ian, I'm going to come back to you, but I have to go a little bit faster. And then the last one: high level, other considerations, right? Help your kids understand this is very real life, okay? You know that you're live frog — you need to do that big English paper — but you also know that you're in the car waiting for a doctor's appointment for 40 minutes? Not going to happen. So where are you and what can you do? How much time do you really have? Like this is again, it's higher order thinking because we have to have this kind of moment where we reconcile what we ought to do, what we must do, what we should do versus what we can do. And then your try is contextually prioritizing, which is pretty impressive if I may say.

And then number three: the daily plan, okay? This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where we've put a lot of time into thinking. Now let me speak to this for a moment because so far we've done a lot of work without actually working, and there's this famous AB Lincoln quote that I love — I should put it in here, by the way, need to quick capture that — AB Lincoln said "if you want me to chop down a tree and I have seven hours, I'll spend six sharpening my axe." It's the same thing, right? Don't just work — be dynamic with your time. Spend time thinking about what we must do, what we ought to do, what is going to give us the highest leverage output, and start teaching kids as young as five, seven, 10 to think like this, right? Because if we do this, we're then going to have more deliberate and dynamic work.

Another example of using history: this is Ben Franklin. We know Ben Franklin's family own a printing press. You can actually see his daily journal. He he time boxed and he was so — any type A folks here? All right, look at this. You can't see the whole thing. Ben Franklin was so type A he put "things in their place," "supper," "music or diversion." This man planned his distractions and he's like "you have one hour for diversions," right? Look at — I mean he made a goal for the day. He'd work from 8 to 11: there's urgency there. Two-hour lunch break, read, overlook, dine, work more, sleep, okay? Very dynamic. If again, if you're racing the clock, I love this stuff. My ADHD loves this. I have this much time to do this thing.

Raise your hand if you're really bad at time estimates? Like I — that is my greatest weakness as an executive function skill. So I am unrealistic about what I can do every day, and here is how you can solve for that. And by the way, I don't have this perfected, so please don't think I'm like some expert — I'm certainly not.

There's something called a fudge ratio, which you track — you're my data-driven people — you track, you look at what you thought things were going to take timewise for a week and then what they actually took, and then you reconcile the two. So if I thought something was going to take me 30 minutes, right, and it took me an hour, I would divide 30 by 60 and my fudge ratio would be two, right? So every time I think something's going to happen, I multiply times that. Does that make sense? So helping our kids — it's it's kind of like I'm really bad at golf and instead of investing in time getting better, I just compensate. I'm like "I always shank it to this way so I'm gonna turn my body a little bit," right? That's kind of what a fudge ratio is like. I could try to like fix my time blindness or I could just plan for it, right?

I would do this with my wife. I have to lie to her. She's like "is this a Katie 1:30 or a real 1:30?" because I have to give her like a 30-minute lie to kind of like get her places on time, and it's just like a compensation.

I'm going to give you this at the end, but essentially I have a resource that can help you build a task management — it's what Emmy did — and there's also a like a little course and some other courses that I'll give you, and one of them is me walking your kiddo through that.

Here are some student examples — I didn't get your example on here, I should have now that I think about that — but here are some student examples. Here are some systems. Again, you're introducing kids to really high level stuff and you're letting them build it, and it's really fun because they check in each week or so and they show you what they've done. So here's an example of a Kanban: to do, doing, done. And you're working through a flow. The goal is to win, right? Get to the done column. That's different from just crossing things off or — again, an Eisenhower Matrix.

The digital calendar — this is a kid who is incredibly dyslexic and never did any work until he took this class. You can tell there's tons of typos, but he liked to code and I said "what if you made doing work like coding?" and he — I said "explain coding to me and you're understanding." He said "well there's inputs and there's outputs and certain things happen if then." I said "can't isn't work like that?" So we read a passage of the book Getting Things Done, which is a fantastic book if you've never heard of it. It's like the book on — like is that in the title? He said redundantly, "it's the book on getting things done." You input information: is it urgent, yes or no? If it's urgent, call 911. If it's not that kind of urgent, make it happen. It's really cute and he had a lot of fun with it, and we put a piece — we printed this out and we put a a piece from the game Sorry on it, and he just moved it around for each thing that came in.

I'm going to show you this real quick. This is another student. Raise your hand if you have a child who would spend or you are a child who would spend more time building something to avoid doing work than actually just doing the work? Anybody? I'm like that too, right? I'm totally guilty of that. You give me something that would take 30 minutes but I don't want to do it, so I'll spend four hours building something that will help me. It's like a Rube Goldberg machine, right?

This student coded an app. Let see — hold on, hold on, hold on, all my quotes — here, here we go. So this student coded an app. It's a it's a visual — oh of course it's not gonna work, sorry. Oh there it go, it's just really slow internet. So there's two things you can do on this: you can send me a meme or you can make a pie. And then within that there's subtasks. So he made this little app to get things done, and it was a way for him to put off decision-making — you rank each thing when it comes in and it automatically, you know, you can go home. It's really cool and again, this is like applied authentic learning. This kid built a task management system and actually didn't do the actual work for it, but but he will, okay? It's like a "teach a man how to fish" kind of thing. I'm just trusting that he's going keep fishing.

Hold on, hold on — this is what happens I take I take a risk here. I go go off script for a sec. Oh boy, one sec, you guys. The the big picture is this: if we can let go of the how again and we can help our kids build flexible systems, they might very well build things that actually matter and actually help them and let go of the one-size-fits-all this that a lot of us suffer from and our kids especially. So sorry.

The other thing that I want to show you is again fun challenges. This same kid I mentioned that like I would have kids send me a meme or something like that — it's fun, it's a fun way to get your child to do what? To quick capture, to put something in a calendar, to take action in the future, right? So I said "send me a meme on Friday at 3." This kid made a meme and then got his whole family and all the kids in the class to spam email me at the same time, and I was — he was like "got you, Mr. Sam," and I was like "actually, I got you because you just LED people to do something two weeks out and you planned and you followed up" — like that's it, right? Again, it's authentic, it's fun, it's silly, but they're learning the skills. And then, you know, that thing that you did with the meme, should we do that with math, right? Leading there.

All right, now the other part about this is AI. What about all this AI business? I think that — this is controversial — I think that AI could be a great equalizer for neurodivergent people, a lot of people who really struggle with certain executive function skills. Of course it's controversial, there's mixed feelings. I'm happy to talk through it. However, at the end of the day, I think this could be a great equalizer, a great moment for equity in our space. And one thing that I wanted to do with you is show you a way in which you might use AI to help.

Now there's obviously a great many ways, there are a lot of tools. It seems like everybody has that little lightning bolt thing on their apps and sites and so forth for AI, but there's really basic ways — you don't have to spend any money. I'm going to do a little demo just using ChatGPT right now and show you how this can be done. But the key is this: I see AI like a calculator. Our kids need to understand the math that they're doing and then they can use the tool. The same is true with this. I want them to understand and guide — they must understand what it is to have an Eisenhower Matrix or a Kanban system or what prioritization looks like, and then they can use a really cool tool to help them get there, right? A bunch of different ways that this can be a great equalizer as well for speech to text, formatting emails, spell checking things. But for when it comes specifically to task management, I'm going to show you a little example here.

Now the internet's pretty slow here, so I don't know how well this will work. Bear with me — got to take risks. The other — you guys, okay, let's see if this works.

Now I personally use — I don't use the talk to feature as much because I don't think it's kind of slow and it doesn't always transcribe, but for funsies we're going to try.

"ChatGBT, can you hear me?" "Yes, I can hear you. How can I help you today?" "So I'm doing a presentation in front of a bunch of people right now. Can you say hi?" "Hello everyone, thanks for having me. Hope you all enjoy the present—" "Okay, I'm going to interrupt you, sorry. So we have a lot going on, we're talking about executive function systems and task management, and I'm telling everyone that we can use you to create a system. Could you help me with that?" "Absolutely, I'd be happy to help you create a system." "Okay, so here's what we're going to do: I'm going to upload my to-do list for today and I want you to use a must, should, want system to help me get focused on what I need to do today, and if you have any questions about things, please let me know." "Got it. Once you upload your to-do list, I'll help you sort tasks into what you must, should, and want to do."

Okay, so what we're going to do now — oh man, oh, I had to quit out of hers, she didn't didn't work — but what what I would typically do there is I would upload my my to-do list — my mouse is died — I would upload my to-do list in there and then I will ask it — the key is saying, first of all, you notice I asked a bunch of yes or no questions. Do you want me to try again? Is it worth it? How how we doing on time? Oh we're good, oh we're good. This is okay, let me try this.

While setting that up quickly, please go — I'm almost done, I'm almost done, okay, every — thank you. So here's my C list for the day. I'm just going to copy and paste it over from my list. I'm going to put it in here. Normally I would go back and forth and I would emphasize that it does a bunch of clarification questions. Don't just tell it to do something because it doesn't have the whole picture. Most of us write down tiny little bits and we don't have context, so you need to ask it like "when are these things due? What is the importance?" and I will have a conversation with it. But just for funsies, now we're going to see what it comes up with and then we'll let it put it together.

So she's not asking me questions right now, but see, I had to get ready for today, I practice. I can even ask it to zero in and do things like "I'll say I'm still overwhelmed by that list" or "I don't agree this is really important because of this," and I will clarify. And again, the the AI is actually more of a conversation partner than it is actually thinking for me because if your child is struggling with making decisions, there's no better way than being polarized, right? If someone disagrees, they're probably going to correct it and then therefore arrive at the proper conclusion. So whether or not the vehicle is the AI or it's the conversation, the outcome will more or less be the same, right? And you can try different models: "I want you to use the Eisenhower Matrix," "I want you to use the Getting Things Done Matrix," right? Whatever it might be. The goal is the same — it's that interfacing with this.

I'm sorry my demo didn't work very well — this is what happens, but it's okay, we persevere, okay? Oh goodness, you guys, we're going to get there together. The big thing that I want to end on is because I want to leave time for you to go and check everything out — the big thing that I want to end on is this: it's that like everything, it's important that we are flexible, it's important that we are letting go of how things come to pass, and it's important that we are helping our students understand the difference between knowing and doing. Because that difference can save lives. Understanding that one can be smart and not get things done is a heck of a lot different than being smart and lazy or not motivated, right? And so many of our kids, they're smart enough — and if your kid's in here, you're smart enough — to know the difference, and it feels kind of lousy when you're like "I know this stuff, why can't I just turn in the paper?" right? That is a really difficult place to be. And when you have that level of awareness and intelligence and you're still not getting the work done, that's when we can start to kind of tailspin and spiral a bit, right?

And so it's so very important that we intervene, that we share this language. They shouldn't have to wait till graduate school to learn this stuff, right? If we can intervene now, we can help our kids — they can save face, they can enjoy the process and gamify it, they can get things done and they can feel good about it. And guess what? You could start involving them more in the parenting decisions that you're making. How many things do you do every day where you're just thinking for your child? What if you just involve them? You know, "we have to do these things. I'm thinking make sense for us to go to CVS first because this why, or should we do the other way around?" right? And just put it on them and see if they agree.

Little things that you're doing all the time — you are outsourcing your prefrontal cortex to them. You might as well involve them in the computing. The Silicon Valley are hitting right now — it's so good, okay? We're there.

So three things: Number one, we talked about our executive function skills. Number two, we investigated how it all works, right? And number three, we looked at different ways that you can help your kid build a task management system. So I'm going to end with this — this is a little QR code that you can scan. There's like 12 or 13 different like demo classes, but one of them is an executive function class that you can check out, and it's like a 40-minute demo where they they basically get like a Google doc and they can build — or you can use this as a parent too — basically build a task manager. So it's just a teaser of like the class that Demi took, that Emmy took.

I am going to wrap up here and I'll be in the main room. I know we have to wrap so — oh, okay, I know people maybe want to go. Let's do this: I'm gonna go in that room because a lot of you want to go there, and then if you want — if you have any specific questions, you can come talk to me at my table. And I just want you to to leave thinking — again, it's not about a one-size-fits-all, it's not about agenda books, it's about separating the knowing and the doing and helping your kids let go of the how and being flexible.

Thank you very much. Thank you Emmy, I'm sweaty. Thank you.