A Manifesto for Academic & Executive Function Coaches, Inspired by Dolly Parton
Recently, my friend, colleague, and Anti-Boring Learning Lab member Edward Coronado III posted an instagram video about what he calls “Dolly's ultimate college hack:” treat college like a 9-to-5 job.
It’s worth a watch (and a like and subscribe, too!). Check it out here.
And honestly? It’s good advice.
For students who have the ability to stay on campus between classes, treating the school day as roughly 9 to 5 can be an incredibly effective strategy. You eliminate transitions. You don't go back to your dorm and discover your extremely comfortable bed, or wander into the kitchen to see what's in the refrigerator. You're already on campus, where you can study, use the library, go to office hours, and get help when you need it.
Even better, as Edward points out: getting your work done during the day can mean that your nights and weekends are actually yours.
I love that.
And yet, when I saw Edward invoke Dolly Parton, I had a surprisingly strong reaction.
Because just a few days earlier, I had discovered how badly I had misunderstood Dolly's “9 to 5” lyrics.
And once I'd heard what she was actually saying, I couldn't unhear it.
Apparently, I Had No Idea What “9 to 5” Was About
A few nights earlier, I had watched 9 to 5 with a group of girlfriends, in celebration of the great Dolly’s life after her recent death.
I’d never seen the movie before. But “9 to 5” was so familiar that I somehow felt like I had. It’s about work, right?! Nine to five. I get it.
Except apparently I didn’t.
As my gal pals and I sang along to the opening credits, I realized I didn't actually know most of the lyrics. Apparently, what I'd actually been singing all these years was something closer to:
“Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’... la la la-la-la, la la la-la-la-la-la-la... it’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it!”
For some reason, I had spent my entire life thinking “9 to 5” was a cheerful working-person’s anthem. Look at us, getting up every morning and doing what needs to be done!
So I looked up the actual lyrics.
“They just use your mind / And they never give you credit.”
“They let you dream just to watch ’em shatter / You’re just a step on the bossman’s ladder.”
Wait, WHAT?
I'd been happily singing along to a song about exploitation and power without noticing the exploitation and power.
And Then There Was the Movie
The movie 9 to 5 surprised me just as much. I had no idea how radical it was. It's feminist! It's collectivist! It's even a little kinky!
It’s also far from intersectional. Women of color are present in the world of the film, but the story still centers three white women as its heroes. Class is very much in the picture, though, and for a movie made in 1980, I was amazed—and also quite saddened—by how much of it holds up.
Then I learned something that made the whole “9 to 5” thing even more interesting: 9to5 was the name of an actual organization of women office workers. Jane Fonda met with members while developing the movie and drew on their experiences of low pay, sexual harassment, lack of advancement, and unequal treatment at work.
So “9 to 5” wasn't just the hours these women worked. It was connected to an actual movement of workers trying to change the conditions of their work.
And that's exactly what the women eventually do in the movie. When they get some power, they don't just become more productive. They create flexible hours, job sharing, and support for workers with children. They start asking what work might look like if it were designed around the actual lives of the humans doing it.
And all of this got me thinking differently about what we ask of students.
What Do We Mean When We Tell Students That School Is Their Job?
Staying on campus can reduce transitions and help students use those weird pockets of time between classes. Creating a boundary around the workday can be incredibly useful.
But I keep getting stuck on the idea of college as “a full-time career.”
We say versions of this all the time: “School is your job.” “Treat college like a full-time job.” I understand what we're trying to communicate. Take it seriously. Give it dedicated time. Use those gaps between classes instead of waiting until 10:00 at night to start everything.
But I wonder what else we're teaching when we say it.
Do we really want school to be students' rehearsal for work life? And do we want “work life” to mean showing up at a particular place for eight hours and expecting your body to accommodate itself to the schedule?
What If Your Body & Brain Don’t Work That Way?
What if you're neurodivergent and being on campus for eight hours is sensory overload? What if after three classes you desperately need quiet, movement, food you can reliably eat, or to lie down? What if your brain is foggy at 2:00 in the afternoon but comes gloriously online at 9:00 at night?
What if you already have a job? Care for someone else? Commute an hour each way? Have transportation that dictates when you can come and go?
These aren't failures of productivity. They're conditions of a human life.
Of course, none of us gets to design every condition of our lives exactly to our liking. Students have 8:00 a.m. classes. Workers have shifts. Professors set deadlines. Part of becoming more capable is learning to do things even when the conditions aren't ideal.
But I also want students to learn to live in their full animal bodies.
I want them to notice when they need sleep, food, movement, quiet, stimulation, rest, other humans, no humans, daylight. I want them to notice when and where their brains work well. I want them to become skillful not just at making themselves work, but at creating conditions in which they can work.
And I don't want work—or school—to be their entire lives.
I Love Learning. But Do I Love Education?
Recently, a friend and I were talking about him starting grad school. I immediately got excited and asked when classes begin.
“Wow. You sure love education!” he observed, tickled by my enthusiasm.
Which made me think. Do I?
I love learning. I love teaching. And I really, really love students.
But education? The institutions we've built around learning? The often unwieldy systems students have to navigate to get access to that learning?
I'm not so sure I love those.
I worry about what we're teaching students to accept as normal: too much work, perpetual catching up, stress, sleep deprivation, shame. When everyone around you is also behind, it starts to seem like this is simply what serious intellectual work is supposed to feel like.
And then, if students struggle, we give them strategies for becoming better at managing themselves.
Which is, of course, my job.
My Sobering Pep Talk
So I went on a bit of a rant to my friend.
“You might get more reading than you can possibly do. You might feel ashamed that you can’t keep up. Or past school trauma might rise up in the form of perfectionism. Learning is invigorating! But school itself is often hard.”
When I finally stopped talking, he responded, “Well, that was a sobering pep talk.”
Which made me laugh out loud—and also feel a little ashamed that I’d gone too far.
But I keep thinking about it.
What if one of the things students learn in school is how to feel perpetually inadequate in the face of an impossible workload—and then to understand the solution as becoming better at managing themselves?
And what happens when we call that preparation for the working world?
What Is Executive Function Coaching For?
This question matters especially for those of us who teach executive function skills. We help students plan, manage their time, regulate their attention, and get things done. I believe deeply in those skills. I wouldn't have built an entire career around teaching them if I didn't.
But I don't want executive function coaching to become training in how to more efficiently tolerate whatever school throws at you!
And those of us doing the coaching aren't neutral observers of all this. We went to school, too.
We Bring Our Own Schooling With Us
I see this all the time in the educators, tutors, and coaches who come into the Anti-Boring Learning Lab. Perfectionism runs rampant. We give ourselves enormous reading lists. We worry that we haven't watched every training yet. We apologize because we're “behind.” We assume everyone else somehow knows more than we do.
We can know intellectually that learning is messy and nonlinear and still feel ashamed when our own learning is messy and nonlinear.
So when a student says, “I didn't finish all the reading,” what happens inside us? Do we immediately start figuring out how they could fit it all in next time? When they're three assignments behind, is our goal automatically to help them get back to zero?
Sometimes it should be! Deadlines are real. Grades have consequences. Students have goals they care about, and part of our job is helping them develop the skills to pursue those goals.
But we can teach time management without suggesting that every problem can be solved by managing time better. We can help students distinguish between “I need a new strategy” and “This is genuinely too much.”
Those are not the same problem.
We are allowed to help students succeed inside a system and critique that system at the same time.
Want to Think About This Stuff With Us?
If you're an academic coach, tutor, teacher, or other educator who wants to get better at helping students with executive function and have a community where we can wrestle with questions like these together, this is exactly what we're doing inside the Anti-Boring Learning Lab.
Our next cohort starts September 9, 2026—but if you’re reading this later, you can still join us!
You'll learn the Anti-Boring Toolkit, practice academic coaching skills, and do it alongside a community of educators who care deeply about students—and aren't afraid to question some of the systems we're helping them navigate.
So What Are Some More 9 to 5 Productivity Hacks?
After all of this, I couldn't resist. If we're going to take productivity advice from the song 9 to 5, what else might we discover?
Here’s my list:
Notice the conditions, not just your performance. Don't immediately conclude that you need more discipline. Sometimes you need a new strategy. Sometimes the conditions really are making the work harder.
Don't do it alone. Study together. Co-work. Go to office hours. Ask for help. Sometimes another person helps you realize the problem wasn't yours alone in the first place.
Design your environment on purpose. Maybe staying on campus from 9 to 5 works beautifully for you. Maybe your brain comes online at 9 p.m. Don't just ask, “How can I make myself focus?” Ask what conditions help your attention do what you want it to do.
Use your mind, not just your compliance. Have ideas. Ask questions. Challenge things. Your mind isn't just there to complete assignments.
Decide when work ends. Schoolwork can expand to fill every available minute. Intentionally deciding when you've done enough is a skill.
Pay attention to your full animal body. Sleep, food, movement, sensory input, stress, other humans, and rest all affect attention. Your body is part of the equation.
Choose what matters instead of trying to do everything. Prioritize. Triage. Negotiate. Accept a tradeoff. Sometimes intentional omission is better executive functioning than heroic completion.
Don't automatically assume you're the problem. Maybe you need a strategy. Maybe you need practice. And maybe the thing you're being asked to do is genuinely difficult or unreasonable. Get curious before you get judgmental.
Let productivity buy you a life. If staying on campus until 5 means you can close your laptop and go have dinner with friends, fantastic. If planning ahead buys you a Saturday off, that's success. And this is where Edward and I wholeheartedly agree: use the day well so that the rest of your life can actually belong to you.
Don't forget to play. Learning and work don't have to be relentlessly serious to matter. Be weird. Laugh. Fantasize. Bring your full self to what you're doing. Sometimes playfulness is exactly what helps us imagine that things could be different.
Phew! I feel inspired just reading this list. What about you? Did I miss anything from the song or the movie that you also think might help students? Please add to the comments.
And Also: Educators Don't Have to Do It Alone
There's one more thing I keep coming back to: the women of 9to5 didn't do this alone.
And neither should we.
I've already told you how much perfectionism I see among the coaches and educators who come into the Anti-Boring Learning Lab. I can't tell you how often the phrase “imposter syndrome” comes up. We think everyone else knows more than we do. We feel behind. We struggle in our workplaces and businesses and assume the struggle says something about us.
And then we talk to each other.
We compare notes about what we're seeing with students and families, in schools and colleges, in our coaching, our workplaces, and our businesses. And sometimes we discover that the thing we were experiencing as my problem isn't only mine.
That's part of what I mean these days when I say Anti-Boring is attention with intention.
We pay attention—to ourselves, to each other, to our students, and to the systems we're operating inside. And then we decide what we want to do with what we notice.
That's what we're doing together inside the Anti-Boring Learning Lab. Yes, we're learning tools and getting better at coaching. But we're also questioning things, imagining something different, and trying things together.
Our students don’t have to do it alone. And you don’t have to either.