The basic control journal is a list of daily activities that are separated according to the general time of day or place that they are to occur.  Often our kids get really overwhelmed with “to do” lists as nothing stands out as more important as anything else…therefore they have a hard time prioritizing what comes first and they “stress out” because they “don’t know what to do” even though everything is listed.  The rule that I have with kids using this schedule is that they cross off the items as they complete them, but they can only work on items in the box that they are currently in.  When they transition to the next box then they need to cross off all of the items in the box that they are leaving even if all of the items are not completed “perfectly”.  If they hyper focus, they can only hyper focus on one box at a time…this significantly decreases the stress for our kid.  We put the control journal in a plastic page and use a dry erase marker to mark things off.   Click the link below to see an example of this control journal.