When I first heard Matt Bowman, OpenEd’s founder, talk about the power of boredom in education, I’ll admit I was skeptical. In a world obsessed with productivity and enrichment, deliberately creating space for children to feel bored seemed counterintuitive, perhaps even negligent.

But Matt’s perspective shifted everything for me: “Sometimes you need to let a child get bored enough to then wake up and say, ‘I have nothing I have to do. What do I want to do?'” he explained. “That’s where the interest comes—at the point when they don’t have to do something. What do they choose to do? It’s super powerful.”

For overwhelmed parents struggling to manage homeschooling or alternative education, this message offers both a breath of fresh air and a permission slip to simplify. What if doing less structured schooling could actually produce better results?

The Overwhelm Epidemic in Home Education

If you’re feeling buried under curriculum, exhausted from managing multiple children at different levels, or constantly worried that you’re not doing enough—you’re not alone.

“That’s a common emotion of any parent,” Matt reassured me during our conversation. “It’s very normal to feel overwhelmed with multiple children who have different needs and interests.”

Parents tell me daily about their struggles: starting school at 8:30am, pushing through until 3pm, and still feeling like they’ve barely scratched the surface of what needs to be done. They’re recreating the traditional school schedule at home, and both they and their children are suffering for it.

Matt’s response to this overwhelm isn’t better scheduling, more curriculum, or stricter discipline. Instead, he offers something radical: scale back dramatically.

The Minimum Effective Dose: 60 Minutes of Learning

For parents drowning in educational expectations, Matt offers a lifeline—what I call the “minimum effective dose” of structured learning:

“If kids are doing 20 minutes of math, 20 minutes of reading, 20 minutes of writing a day, that’s sufficient,” he explains.

That’s just 60 minutes of structured learning daily. Not six hours. Not even three hours. Just one hour, broken into three focused sessions of 20 minutes each.

This is Matt’s recommendation specifically for families experiencing overwhelm—it’s the minimum effective dose that ensures foundational skills continue developing while creating space for the magic of self-directed learning to happen.

The key is surrounding these focused sessions with generous time for exploration:

“Insert in between each of those 20-minute blocks a one-hour recess,” Matt suggests. “Have your nine-year-old come in and read for 20 minutes and go out and play for an hour or go do Legos for an hour. You need an exhausted body to then have your mind be open to learning math for 20 minutes.”

This structure—20 minutes of focused learning followed by an hour of movement or free exploration, repeated three times—creates a rhythm that works with children’s natural attention spans and energy levels rather than against them.

This approach aligns with the Pomodoro Technique, a time management method involving focused work intervals (typically 25 minutes) followed by short breaks. Research indicates that systematic breaks during study sessions can improve mood and efficiency compared to self-regulated breaks. ​

The University of Pittsburgh’s Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences recommends the Pomodoro Technique to build in time for the brain to take breaks, thereby improving focus during study sessions.

Giving Yourself Permission to Scale Back

If you’re currently doing far more than 60 minutes of structured learning daily, the thought of scaling back this dramatically might trigger anxiety. Matt acknowledges this and offers a gentle approach:

“Take a moment, take a breath, stop for a minute and just realize that you might need to just scale back a little bit for a time. Just reset a little bit.”

He suggests reducing whatever you’re currently doing by 50%. If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, reduce by another 50%. Find the point where both you and your children can breathe again.

This isn’t giving up—it’s creating the foundation for a sustainable approach that prevents burnout and preserves the joy of learning.

The Unexpected Power of Boredom

The magic of this scaled-back approach is that it creates space for something precious that’s increasingly rare in children’s lives: boredom.

In today’s overscheduled, overstimulated world, children rarely experience genuine boredom—that state where no one is directing their attention or activity. Yet this unstructured time is crucial for developing intrinsic motivation and discovering genuine interests.

“Let them get bored enough to then wake up and say, ‘I have nothing I have to do. What do I want to do?'” Matt explains. “And then observe over their shoulder what it is that they’re curiously reading or wanting to search about.”

This is where the real educational magic happens. When children discover interests through their own initiative rather than external direction, their engagement goes exponential. They dive deeper, retain more, and develop the self-direction essential for lifelong learning.

Boredom serves as the catalyst for this process—the empty space that children naturally fill with curiosity and exploration when given enough time and freedom.

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The Voice Factor: Why Agency Transforms Learning

Another powerful insight from Matt’s approach is the importance of giving children a voice in their educational journey.

“When a child feels frustrated, oftentimes it means that they feel like they’re being forced into something or trapped or don’t have options or don’t have a voice,” he notes.

His solution? “You design your education plan. You tell me what it is you want to learn over the next week or month, and let’s see what resources we have to feed that interest.”

This doesn’t mean unlimited freedom without guidance. As Matt explains, “It’s not unlimited choice to an eight-year-old. It’s ‘here are some choices that our family can make available to you, which one sounds like something you’d want to try?'”

The reason this matters goes beyond just reducing conflict. As Matt puts it: “Learning can’t be forced. Lasting learning only sinks into a brain or a child when they have some sort of interest or agency around that.”

When learning is compelled, it might go in and come out on a test, but it rarely sticks. When children opt into learning experiences, they engage more deeply and retain more completely.

The Trifecta: Finding Your Sweet Spot

To help parents design personalized education that works for their unique children and family situation, Matt offers what he calls his “trifecta” framework:

1. What interests your child? Not what should interest them, but what actually captures their curiosity and attention.
2. What needs exist in your family, community, and for your child’s future?
3. What resources do you realistically have available to you?

“When you apply that to an education mindset,” Matt explains, “it unlocks so much curiosity and creativity and motivation naturally that you don’t have to force learning. Learning becomes natural and authentic and long-lasting because it intersects along those needs and interests.”

This framework adapts to every family situation. Whether you have one child or several, abundant resources or limited ones, you can find your own sweet spot where these three elements meet.

Two-Week Sprints: The Planning Hack That Eliminates Overwhelm

One practical strategy Matt suggests for implementing this approach is to stop planning for an entire year or even semester.

“Sometimes we get overwhelmed with the year-long plan or what we’re going to do for life,” he notes. Instead, he recommends two-week sprints:

“Hey, Johnny, what do you want to do for the next two weeks? What do you want to learn about? Feed that interest, see where it goes, have Johnny present after two weeks what it is he learned, and then go from there and do another two-week sprint.”

This approach eliminates the pressure of sticking with something that isn’t working just because it was in your yearly plan. It gives you permission to be responsive to your child’s changing interests while maintaining enough structure to see real progress.

Making Education Self-Funding Through Entrepreneurship

A distinctive element of Matt’s approach is his emphasis on entrepreneurship as both an educational opportunity and a practical solution for families on limited budgets.

“Do something entrepreneurial with your children on some days of the week,” he recommends. This might look like:

• Setting up a neighborhood stand
• Creating handmade items to sell at local markets
• Designing a service business
• Participating in children’s entrepreneurial markets

The educational benefits are comprehensive, but there’s also a practical side: “You can use that money to fund other educational experiences,” Matt explains.

I’ve watched OpenEd families use entrepreneurship not just for learning but to create financial breathing room in their educational budgets. One family’s soap-making business now funds their science kits and museum memberships.

A Day in the Life: The Rhythm of Less-Is-More Education

Based on Matt’s approach, here’s how a typical day might flow for a family embracing the “less is more” philosophy:

Morning:

• Family contributions (chores, meal prep)
• 20 minutes reading with 1-hour break for free play
• 20 minutes math with 1-hour break for physical activity
• 20 minutes writing

Afternoon:

• Exploration activities (libraries, nature, community)
• Interest-driven projects
• Entrepreneurship opportunities

Evening:

• Family time WITHOUT homework battles

As Matt pointed out, “After dinner is still family time. That is unlike most traditional school settings where the kids after dinner have two hours of homework.”

This rhythm ensures foundational skills develop while creating abundant space for the deeper learning that happens through self-direction, real-world application, and interest-driven exploration.

Trust the Process

If you’re still wondering how just one hour of formal instruction could possibly be enough, I understand. We’ve all been conditioned to equate hours at a desk with educational value.

But Matt’s perspective offers hope to overwhelmed families: “You don’t need to go til 3pm on a structured hour by hour basis, replicating public school at home. That’s not the right model to think about.”

The alternative is giving children options for completing the essential skills work, interspersed with abundant free time for exploration, play, and real-world engagement.

What’s fascinating is how this approach often leads to children who exceed traditional academic expectations—not because they’ve been pushed, but because they’ve discovered the joy of learning and developed the self-direction to pursue knowledge deeply.

As Matt beautifully puts it: “The hard step is to simplify is to scale back is to prioritize what’s important and shed those things that aren’t. That is the quest.”

For overwhelmed parents, that quest begins with giving yourself permission to do less—and creating the space for the boredom breakthrough that transforms education from something you impose to something your children embrace.

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Sources

1. Biwer, F., Wiradhany, W., Oude Egbrink, M. G. A., & de Bruin, A. B. H. (2023). Understanding effort regulation: Comparing ‘Pomodoro’ breaks and self-regulated breaks. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(Suppl 2), 353–367. https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjep.12593​cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl+3researchgate.net+3bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com+3
2. University of Pittsburgh. (n.d.). Pomodoro Technique. Retrieved from https://www.asundergrad.pitt.edu/study-lab/study-skills-tools-resources/pomodoro-technique​
3. Alpha Schools. (n.d.). The Program. Retrieved from https://alpha.school/the-program/​
4. GovTech. (n.d.). AI System Will Drive Academics at New Virtual Charter School. Retrieved from https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/ai-system-will-drive-academics-at-new-virtual-charter-school