How do you plan when you aren’t in control of your day? This can be issues for families of children or adults with disabilities. Where you focus your attention has an impact on energy levels not only for yourself but for others. Getting active involvement is one goal but joint involvement where there is equal skill or equal workload is a very different thing. Dependent on the role of each person helping their workload and skills required are different. A child is not expected to understand everything yet and things are slowed down so that they can keep up. As kids grow older we expect a more active role, not only in the specific steps that they complete but in their initiation of what needs to be done around them. We expect them to do things without being told. Yet. In the real world, we work in jobs where others can be the ones providing us with a list of tasks to be completed. We don’t get to initiate. We wait til they tell us how and what to do. We learn specific skills at University or on the job training to help us know what to do in that particular work setting with those particular tools. So, who is in control of your day? Personal organisation is a skill that continues to develop over a lifetime because it isn’t a skill where once you’ve done it once then you never have to do it again. It is something that changes because the goals that you are working on change, because the environments that you are working in change, because the objects that you have around you change. Each of these variables gets used in slightly different ways, each takes up a different amount of space on an actual shelf and in the amount of time per day that we use it. Organisational skills are like science. Breaking down things in to groups or categories. Then knowing the correct tool for the correct job at the correct time on the correct day. Plus. You also need to know when to throw things away. You also need to know the limits of the physical space that you have available to you for storing tools or objects. Our days have time limits on them. Within that 24 hour period we need to fit in enough sleep, time to eat, time to toilet, time to clean ourselves, time to spend with others, time to learn, time to earn…. Organisation is a movement skill. It is about managing the flow and the speed and the intensity and duration of objects and interactions that occur over the course of the day, the week, the month etc. It is a movement skill.