The rising sun and buzzing alarm clocks signal the arrival of morning. School bells ring to signal the start of the school day, recess, and the end of the school day. Church bells and cuckoo clocks mark the passing hours. When the kettle boils—it’s teatime. Home from school and work—it’s dinnertime. The sun sets, its bedtime.

Our lives are measured in compartmentalized segments of time slated out for us. So why is managing our time such a challenge?

We are constantly multi-tasking and splitting our time a hundred ways. We talk on the phone, do homework, surf the net, and make tea … all at the same time!

Instead of each of small task taking mere minutes, it takes much longer. Homework should take one and a half hours; instead, it takes close to four.

The hectic pace of our lives, the interruptions, and the distractions do little to help our time management issues. It is difficult to filter out the constant din of TVs, radio, instant messaging alerts, IPods, and of the clang-honk-beep-buzz of our modern world. Adults find focusing on one thing at a time challenging, so it’s no wonder that when kids are faced with a time-management issue, they have no idea how to solve the problem, and put things off until the last minute.

Like so many other skills that we need in life, time management techniques don’t come naturally to all. A little instruction and a lot of learning can help even the busiest of students to complete homework on time, finish projects well ahead of the due date, and to end procrastination for good.

Time Management: it’s a skill that we can all use, both in and out of the classroom.

There’s a grassroots email revolution afoot.

When working on a tight deadline, there is one thing that we can all do without: interruptions. With roughly 39.7 billion person-to person emails sent daily, the time spent replying to the deluge of emails is threatening to drown productivity in offices across Canada and the US. Workers are spending more time sending and receiving emails than they are working on projects.

To help eliminate interruption and distractions, and to help workers focus on a single task at a time, CEOs of large and small companies alike are helping their employees meet deadlines by declaring one day a week email-free.

It may seem old-fashioned, but encouraging employees to talk face to face and to focus on one task at a time is a newer concept in today’s multi-tasking, wired-in workforce. Employers are hoping that by encouraging workers to spend more time face to face with fellow employees there will be a better exchange of ideas and more effective problem solving.

What Students Can Learn from the Email Revolution:

1. You don’t have to be doing 5 things at once to be busy
2. Shut off text messaging, MSN, and Facebook while working on a project
3. Don’t use email to as a tool for procrastination
4. Focus on a single task at a time for a period of time
5. When working on a deadline, the less distractions the better