Initiation

What it is: Initiation is the ability to start working on a task, assignment, or plan. It is moving from intention to action. This key executive function skill is a real struggle for many students across all ages. Difficulties with initiation often lead to procrastination, especially when students are asked to shift from preferred activities to non-preferred tasks like homework or chores. Even when teachers, therapists, or parents provide clear directions, students may still hesitate or fail to start.

Why it matters: When students have weak initiation skills, incomplete assignments and missed tasks can quickly snowball into a backlog that feels unmanageable. As the workload grows, so does their stress—often leading to avoidance, frustration, and a decline in confidence. Without support, these students may begin to view themselves as incapable, which can further impact their motivation and performance.

Why initiation breaks down:

Initiation is not just about willing oneself into action (or being prodded into action by caregivers or teachers!). It’s about having the internal cognitive tools to simulate time, space, and movement—to do a mental “pre-walk-through” of what needs to happen next. Students with ADHD and executive function challenges often experience difficulty with mentally simulating their time and tasks. And all students can benefit from guided practice in building this skill.

How therapists, teachers, and caregivers can help:

By teaching students to move through time in their minds, we can help them initiate, follow through, and feel capable.

📘 Resource Spotlight: The Time Tracker Program

We’re excited to share tools from our new book series, The Time Tracker Program! Each resource is designed to help students of all ages develop time awareness, planning, and self-monitoring skills.

This month’s featured tool for supporting initiation is adapted from Volume 1:

Foundations of Time Awareness

Chapter 2: Making Time Visible - Lesson 2: Visualizing Analog Time

This lesson walks students through how to use analog clocks to help them see and plan tasks across time, supporting the interconnected EF skills of time awareness and initiation. It’s a powerful way to move students from reactive to proactive behavior.

People who are demonstrating strong EF reflexively use internal clocks complete with time markers that combine the features of space (i.e., the physical spaces they will be moving through) and time in their planning. To take a daily life example, if you have set your alarm clock for 7:10 a.m. and you know that you will need to be out the door by 7:50 a.m. to get to work on time, then your reflexive mental visualization of this process will involve an internal clock that lets you know (and pre-see and pre-feel) roughly where you will need to be when in order to make this happen. In essence, we point to the marks of time on an analog clock in our minds when we are planning, and we match these marks to mental images of the spaces we will be passing through to reach our desired goals.

But many of our students are unable to answer the question, “If you need to be out the door by 7:50 a.m., then where do you picture yourself at 7:20?” This gap in internal time simulation often leaves students feeling stuck or unsure of how to begin.

When a student can’t initiate a task, we often hear things like:

“I don’t know where to start.”

“I’ll do it later.”

“Wait—but I’ve been working on this the whole time!” (They haven’t: They are multi-tasking or engaging in tasks other than the one they actually need to initiate.)

📥 CLICK Below to download the Time Tracker worksheet

Analog Clocks: It’s More Than Just Shading Time!

Analog clocks are an essential tool for helping students build the skill of seeing, planning, and initiating their movement through time and tasks.

Many of you have seen us model the strategy of shading time on an analog clock with a dry erase marker—and while it may appear simple, it is cognitively rich and profoundly impactful. And while many of you already love using analog clocks in your work (❤️ yes!), we want to shine a light on what’s actually happening in the brain when we use this tool well—and why it works.

In this video the student randomly shaded 30 minutes on the clock without truly envisioning how that time would unfold or what they wanted to accomplish. Without pre-feeling the passage of time or having a clear sense of what was coming next, they struggled to initiate, lost focus, became distracted, and eventually lost track of time completely.

Why It Works: The Brain Science Behind It

Shading a Clock = MIME of the Mind

When a student picks up a dry erase marker and traces the sweep of the minute hand—let’s say, from 4:30 to 5:00—they are not just drawing time. They are rehearsing movement. They are miming their own progression through space and time.

This is neurocognitive training. In this shaded wedge of time, they are:

Visualizing how long something will take. Creating a concrete, visual volume of time that has shape and direction (not just a flat thought like “20 minutes” or a number :20)
Associating that time with specific, physical actions (e.g., “I’ll be at about problem 5 on my math worksheet by 4:45”).
Building a spatial-temporal map that links intention to action.
Engaging working memory by holding time and task in mind.
Reducing cognitive load, offloading the mental work of tracking time to something visible and external.
Future thinking (seeing what comes next).
Rehearsing inhibition—because the shaded time is visually telling their brain, “Not yet. Focus now.”
Self-regulating and using self-directed behavior. Students notice when they’re drifting from the plan and can redirect their own attention from distraction with less prompting from adults.
Engaging in goal-directed persistence.

In this video, the student demonstrates strong time management by shading the clock in the clockwise direction, actively pre-imagining how the 30-minute block will unfold. By establishing time and space markers—what they aim to complete by specific points and what’s coming next, like soccer—they engage in self-directed talk that supports initiation, sustained attention, and proactive management of potential distractions. This planning process transforms time into something tangible and helps the student regulate their behavior with intention

We call this the MIME of time—a way of externalizing the internal movement we want students to feel: the sense of beginning, persisting, and finishing tasks within a defined space. Students can see and feel ownership of their plans. Rather than being pushed by adults to move toward something they can’t see, they are participating in moving toward goals they themselves can understand and see their own way toward.

Practitioner Corner: Kristen Helps a College Student "See" Time - an analog clock breakthrough

I was recently working with a student, Marcus—a freshman in college—who had been struggling with time management for years. From middle school through high school, time had always felt slippery to him, like something he couldn’t quite hold onto. Now, as a college student juggling classes, work, and his social life, those challenges had even bigger consequences—failing a class, losing a job.

Marcus shared example after example that showed how deeply this impacted his daily life. In high school, for instance, he once stopped to get gas on the way to school when a classmate called and said, “Where are you? We have a pop quiz in Bio this morning—you’ve got to get here now!” So he abandoned getting gas, rushed to school for the quiz... and then didn’t have enough gas to get to work later that afternoon, making him late again. He could never seem to stay ahead of the day.

Things hadn’t improved much in college. One day, he had a shift as a waiter at 5:00 p.m., but 30 minutes prior to his shift, he decided to swing by a sporting goods store across town to grab a new pair of sneakers for work. He figured, no big deal—I’ve got time. But of course, traffic and distance didn’t factor into his mental math, and he arrived at work 40 minutes late.

This kind of scenario played out over and over. Marcus wasn’t careless or unmotivated—he just had never learned how to manage time in a way that worked. When we first met, Marcus told me flat out: “Agenda books and calendars don’t work for me.” He shared how lots of adults had him fill out calendars and agenda books. “They are useless. I’ve tried them all,” he said. “They just don’t help. I write it down but I forget to look at it. Or I look at it and I realize everything about my day has changed and now I can’t do it anymore.” He had tried every app, planner, and reminder system out there, but nothing seemed to stick. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t have a system—it was that none of those systems made time feel real to him.

As a clinician who specializes in time and executive function skills, it’s so clear to me that sometimes you can’t start with calendars. That is not the issue.

So we tried something different. I introduced him to the strategy I often use with students who struggle with time blindness: shading time on an analog clock. Together, we looked at an analog clock and physically shaded in blocks of time for activities in the hour. He shaded in examples from the student scenarios in our Time Tracker Program - like those in the worksheet for you to download. Marcus could actually see where the time was going and how it all fit together.

When I asked if he’d ever thought about time this way before, he looked at the clock for a few seconds, then said, “No… never. No Way.. It would’ve made high school so much easier. Never in my life have I ever thought about time on a clock. I wish I had.” Then he said something expletive… lol… it was a total eye-opener for him. He just looked stunned. You know when you take a risk as a clinician with an older student and you wonder how they will react to it?

He said, “If I had thought about time that way I would’t have gotten into all that trouble in high school.” But then he said, “I am just not good at this.” So, I reassured him we can practice helping him to see and feel time until it feels natural. He continued, “I'm just terrible at this. Everyone has told me my whole life I am bad at this.” His whole life he was told he was not good at this and just thought it was an attribute he could not change. He had a fixed mindset. He needed to know this skill can be taught, learned, and internalized.

That moment stuck with me. It’s such a simple tool, but for Marcus, it was transformational. Seeing time visually helped him start to estimate how long tasks would really take. He began building in buffers for transitions. He started to feel more in control, and slowly, the lateness and chaos started to ease.

For students like Marcus, time management isn’t just about having a planner—it’s about learning to visualize and internalize time first. And that’s a skill we can teach before introducing them to a planner.

So shading on a clock is not just for young learners reading an analog clock. To age it up for students in high school and college, we make this same strategy of shading on a clock metacognitive. I tell them, “Let’s move your pen and envision, as the time passes, where you picture yourself.” You are still drawing on a clock, but it is what you have them thinking about as they are shading on a clock—simulating their action through space and time.

Try This Strategy:

Use a real analog clock or printable “Working Clock.” Label the start and end times, then physically shade the span of time for a task or routine.

Shade in the actual volume of time using a dry erase marker

Label key transition points. Add task markers. Use small icons or sticky notes to visualize what will be happening at each stage.

Prompt mental time simulation: “Where will you be at 7:30?” "What does 7:45 look like?”

Practice this across different contexts—home, classroom, therapy.

Bonus Tip: Pair this strategy with physical movement or gestures to “mime” transitions—walking from one station to another or using hand motions to simulate the clock's movement. These embodied experiences further support internalizing time and tasks.

CLICK Below for a student worksheet from The Time Tracker Program!

This is how we move from procrastination to action—by giving students tools that mimic the executive function skills we want them to internalize. Our approach is about much more than managing minutes—it’s about helping students build a mental model of success. By teaching them to move through time in their minds—and giving them the visuals to support that movement through time and space—we’re helping them initiate, follow through, and feel capable.

That’s the magic of this work. And we’re so glad to be doing it alongside you!

🎓 Professional Development & Events

🆓 Free Webinar: Mastering Time Management Skills

When: Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Time: 12:00-1:00 PM EST

Click Here to Register!

Join us for a webinar about our Time Tracker Program that we are offering for free to celebrate the launch of our new Time Tracker Program book series!

You don't have to own the books to join! We will be offering helpful tips and strategies for time management and executive functioning that caregivers, educators, and therapists can use to support their students in elementary grades through high school.

🎥 Can’t attend live? Register to get the replay.

We hope to see you there! Kristen and Sarah