Date Presented 04/19/21
People with impaired executive functioning often experience difficulties with managing time and organizing daily life. This study shows that improved time management skills and satisfaction with daily occupations after intervention with Let's Get Organized are maintained 1 year after intervention.
Primary Author and Speaker: Maria Wingren
Additional Authors and Speakers: Chih-Ying Li
PURPOSE: Time management skills are essential to handle everyday life such as to maintain a job and create a supportive family life. People with impaired executive functioning often experience difficulties with managing time and organizing daily life which commonly persist over the lifespan and there is a need to establish interventions with sustainable results. Let's Get Organized (LGO) is a manual-based occupational therapy group intervention that focuses on time management skills showing promising results, though the long term results are yet to be explored. The aim of this study was to evaluate the long-term results of the Swedish version of LGO (LGO-S) for people with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or mental disorders, 12 months after the intervention.
DESIGN: The design of the study was a 12-month follow-up of a pretest-posttest intervention study. Participants in this study were recruited from the sample participating in the earlier study of Holmefur et al. (2019). The original sample were included at five psychiatric and habilitation outpatient services in Sweden by occupational therapists working at these services The recruitment was based on the following inclusion criteria; 1) neurodevelopmental disorder without intellectual disability, such as ASD or ADHD, or a confirmed diagnosis of a mental disorder and 2) self-reported difficulties in time management in daily life to an extent that it affects functioning in daily life negatively. An additional inclusion criterion for the present study was availability of pre- and post-intervention measures in the earlier study (Holmefur et al., 2019).
METHOD: Time management, organization and planning and regulations of emotions were measured with Assessment of Time Management Skills, Swedish version (ATMS-S), executive functioning was measured with Swedish version of Weekly Calendar Planning Activity (WCPA-SE), and satisfaction with daily occupations was measured with Satisfaction with Daily Occupations instrument (SDO-13). The demographics of the participants were reported with descriptive statistics. Wilcoxons' signed-rank test was used to compare the pre- and post-intervention, 3- and 12-month follow-up data.
RESULTS: The 38 participants in the long term follow-up maintained their significantly improved results in time management and regulation of emotions 12 months after intervention, and showed even further significant improvement in organization and planning 12 months after intervention. Moreover the participants' significantly increased satisfaction with daily occupations and global satisfaction post-intervention were maintained at 12-month follow-up. This study shows the contribution of that LGO-S improvements in time management, organization and planning, emotional regulation, and satisfaction with daily activities can be maintained over time.
CONCLUSION: Participation in the LGO-S intervention can improve and maintain time management, organization and planning, regulations of emotions and satisfaction with daily occupations in the long term, and could be of importance for occupational therapists to offer sustainable improvement in time management.
References
Holmefur, M., Lidström-Holmqvist, K., Roshanay, A. H., Arvidsson, P., White, S., & Janeslätt, G. (2019) Pilot study of ‘Let's Get Organized' - a group intervention for improving time management. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 73 (5), 7305205020. https://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.2019.032631
Janeslätt, G., Lidström-Holmqvist, K., White, S., & Holmefur, M. (2018) Assessment of time management skills: psychometric properties of the Swedish version, Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 25:3, 153-161. https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2017.1375009
