Posts tagged “Words to kids”

When your kid won't get ready in the morning and you're on your third 'hurry up!' before 7:45 — TodoGatya lets the kid draw the next task in the morning routine themselves, and the self-determination piece cuts the nagging in half.

My kid won't get ready in the morning, but the second I say anything it's 'I've got it, stop telling me.' Todo Bingo puts the tasks on a board and lets him pick the order. How we use the center square and a summer-homework calendar, from our actual house.

My kid asks 'how many more?' every 30 seconds all morning. TodoLadders turns the day into a visual schedule board he can read himself — plus a way to break 'do your homework' into steps small enough that nothing stalls out.

Piano, math sheets, sight words. My kid skips a couple days and tries to throw the whole streak out. TodoFarm logs what he actually did, not a yes/no — 5 minutes counts as 5 minutes, and a zero day doesn't erase the past. A habit tracker for kids built to break the all-or-nothing mindset.

My kid hits me with 'ten worksheets for game time, remember?' and I genuinely cannot remember if I said it. TodoBank is a reward-tracking app for kids: the deal lives in a passbook instead of my memory, 'three more to go' shows up as a balance, and on a low-energy day the balance covers it.

The longest part of any timer in our house is after it goes off. PlanetLoopTimer is a visual timer for kids where the break is something the kid launches himself — a planet around the sun, no number ticking down against his will — so the end is one he actually agreed to. My script went from 'time's up' to 'Mercury or Neptune?'

Summer homework wasn't getting done, so I cut all of it into TodoBingo squares and taped the whole summer to the wall. A month's plan finished in two weeks.

Closet open, kid frozen for three minutes. "Just pick something." Iyengar & Lepper's 2000 jam study (24 options vs 6) explains it. Why narrowing choices got him moving — and why the same logic runs through our Todo apps and the way I scope projects at work.

My kid forgets to even look at the to-do list I wrote for him. A note on workplace schedulers, presupposition questions, and working memory research — and what's actually going on with kid memory.

'Brush your teeth' — 'I did it' — 'you're literally just holding the toothbrush in your mouth.' The kid's 'I did it' and the parent's 'done' are different things. Same structure as a requirements-vs-implementation gap at work.