How to Use Session Time to Prepare Clients for Homework

Most therapists assign the week’s homework in the last 90 seconds of session. There isn’t time to walk through what the form is asking, and there isn’t time for the client to ask the one question that would have stopped them misreading the third field. Even with a clean portal already holding the assignment, ninety seconds is not enough for any client to absorb a new instruction and remember the trigger when they actually need it.

The fix is to put the homework into the body of the session, not the last 90 seconds.

The last ten minutes of session are the homework slot. You walk through what you’re going to assign, why this assignment fits this week, and what the first row would look like. You let your client ask one question about it. You set the trigger together: “When are you most likely to hit a panic spike this week? Tuesday morning at the gym, your usual? Right. Open the form then, before you do anything else.”

By the time they walk out, they know what the form asks and when they’ll use it. They’ve already imagined doing it once.

In my-cbt, you can pull up the assignment with them on the screen during session. Show them the personal message you’ve written at the top. Read it aloud together. If they ask “what does this question mean”, you adjust it before they leave. The form they see on their phone tonight is the form they read with you ten minutes ago.

The cost is ten minutes of session time. The return is a much higher chance the homework gets done at the right moment, and a much lower chance you spend the start of the next session re-explaining what they were supposed to do.