For those of you playing at home for our homeschool elections (in this blog I shared we were holding elections at our homeschool to choose the name of the school and to elect a school captain and a kindergarten captain) I’ve got bad news.

My preferred name for the school, Dragon Flame School, came in second with the winner being Midnight Star School. (So not too bad, but clearly no Dragon Flame School.)

And perhaps unsurprisingly, Scarlett and Ami both got elected unanimously and unopposed for the positions of school captain and kindergarten captain, respectively. A very proud day in our family.

Running a homeschool is an interesting experiment. We’re very lucky to be living with my parents and having them both involved. Dad’s an ex-school principal and Mum is a child psychiatrist. So we’ve got a pretty well-qualified staff. Trish is the principal, Dad is head of the computer science department, I’m head of the maths department and Mum is the play doctor.

Not surprisingly I think Scarlett is learning more at home with three half-hour blocks of maths, English, Spanish, or computer programming than she does on a full day of regular school. This is no criticism of her school or her teachers – it’s a very different thing teaching 20 kids at a time to teaching one-on-one. And there are lots of things she gets at regular school that she’s not getting at home.

However, I think three focussed sessions of 30 minutes each is about the most we can expect from her.

I actually think it’s the most I can expect from myself too. Given I’m a grown-up I extend that a bit to up to 60 minutes. But any day where I do three sessions of deep, focussed work of half an hour to an hour each is a good day. And there’s always plenty of emails and conversations and admin to fill the rest of the time.

My recommendation is that you fight for three sessions of productive deep work a day. They only need to be half an hour each. And you need to fight for them, protect them, and prioritise them. Do that and good things will happen.