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Every August, families ask us some version of the same question: What can we do now to help our students start the school year organized?

This year, New York Magazine’s The Strategist asked us, too, for its back-to-school piece on planners. And the answer is less exciting than you might think. As one of our executive function specialists, Rora Brodwin, told the magazine, “Using a planner without actually developing good planning habits is like buying a fancy gym membership and never going.”

Below is a follow-up note from Rora covering the core skills, habits, and practical methods that actually make a difference in students’ academic lives:

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As I recently told New York Magazine’s The Strategist for its back-to-school piece on planners, there is no perfect planner, app, or organizational system that suddenly creates strong executive functioning. And in my work with students, I’ve seen just about every system imaginable. The students who become more independent aren’t necessarily the ones with the fanciest tools; they’re the ones who practice a few fundamental skills consistently enough that they become habits.

As we head into September, here are four skills I come back to again and again:

1. Don't just have a planner. Practice planning.

A planner only works if a student reliably uses it. Build in 10 minutes every day to record assignments, check school portals, look ahead, and decide what needs to happen next. The goal is to make planning itself a routine.

2. Break it down and put it on the calendar.

“History paper due October 16” is not a plan. Students need practice turning big assignments into smaller, concrete steps – research, outline, draft, revise – and assigning those steps to actual days. This is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught, modeled, and practiced.

3. Practice estimating time.

Estimating how long a task will take is a surprisingly sophisticated skill - one students are still developing. Once an assignment is broken into components, students can practice predicting the time required for each piece. In effective EF coaching, then, this is something you’ll hear often: How long do you think this will take? With calendar and time blocks in hand, students can compare their estimates with reality. Over time, students develop a more accurate internal sense of time and become better able to plan around it.

4. Practice reflection.

The goal isn’t only to complete work; it’s also to learn from the work process. Once a week, ask: What worked? What didn't? What should I do differently next week? The goal is to identify a specific strategy worth repeating or changing.

These practices are simple. Doing them consistently and independently is not. Executive skills - planning, organizing, remembering, initiating, and self-monitoring - are still developing throughout adolescence and into young adulthood. Students need explicit instruction, repetition, and plenty of scaffolding before these routines are truly internalized and integrated into their daily lives.

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If some of these practices seem abstract, that’s because they are. That's why we believe EF work is often most powerful when it's embedded directly in students' academic lives. It's much easier to learn how to break down a long-term assignment while actually breaking down your history paper. For many students, this support is most effective when provided by a tutor who is fluent across academic domains, supporting both the how and the what of the work. Rather than separating executive functioning from academics, a skilled tutor will build executive skills in the very context in which students need to use them.

If you're not sure where your student's EF systems stand heading into September, we're happy to help identify what's working, what could be improved, and what kind of support might be most useful.