3 Effective Strategies for Assigning Therapy Homework

Assigning therapy homework can make a world of difference for reinforcing the goals you and your clients work on in sessions. When done well, these assignments can help clients practice new skills, gain insights, and make meaningful changes in their lives. As a Licensed Therapist who has worked with hundreds of clients, I can confidently say that when clients take the work outside of their session, magical things happen. 

Here’s how to create impactful therapy homework tailored to your client’s needs, with innovative strategies to ensure they remember and complete their assignments.

1. Tailoring Homework to Fit Your Client's Needs

Identify What Your Client Needs

Every client is different. When you're exploring what type of homework to assign your client, you need to consider their mental state, environment, resources, and stage of change. Make it collaborative by asking the client what they feel is possible, and make it small and achievable. This could be a journal prompt, a behavioral experiment, or even showing up to the next session. The more your client succeeds, the more confident they will feel over time. Let’s look closer at the types of homework you can try.

Behavioral Change and Habit Formation

For clients who are motivated and looking to change specific behaviors or establish new habits, focus on practical, actionable tasks. Tailor the behavioral tasks to their specific goal and presenting problems. As a mental health therapist who works with anxiety disorders, I will have my client start logging their typical routines and behaviors, mood, and what they tend to do when they feel anxious. Their homework becomes the Daily Log. When we have data, we work on adding in helpful behavioral changes, such as a new anxiety coping skill or replacing an unhelpful behavior. This new routine is the work they take outside of session.

• Daily Logs: Encourage clients to keep a daily log of their behaviors, noting triggers, responses, and outcomes. This can uncover patterns and drive change, and help you identify what behavioral change will be helpful.
• Routine Practices: Assign small, manageable steps they can incorporate into their daily routine, like a five-minute mindfulness exercise or a short walk.

For those looking for behavioral tasks to offer clients, Habitbetter Pro provides therapists with an entire library of evidence-based coping skills for a variety of presenting problems. You can then assign these skills directly to them within your clients’ app, allowing you and your client to monitor and track their treatment plan together.

Processing and Journal Prompts

For clients working through emotions or seeking more insights, journal prompts can be a powerful tool. Journaling is also a great place to start when a client is pre-contemplative, contemplative, new to therapy, or needing to make sense of what they want to see change in the first place. Journal prompts can prompt a specific task from the client, such as gratitude prompts, or they can provoke more exploration from the client on the session’s topic. As a therapist, I often use them as a way to help the client take their in-session discoveries out of the session. Many times, my clients come back to the next therapy session with a clear idea of what  they want to talk about and even new insights.

• Reflective Journaling: Guide clients to reflect more on a specific insight or question that came up in the session. 
• Brain Dump: Encourage clients to write freely about their thoughts and feelings on specific issues or experiences in order to foster more insight and self attunement.
• Guided Journaling: Provide prompts such as, “What are three things you felt grateful for today?” or “Describe a challenge you faced this week and how you responded.”

Habitbetter Pro comes preloaded with a library of therapist-approved journal prompts to assign directly to your client via the app, and allows for custom made journal prompts.

Extra Education and Courses

For clients needing additional knowledge or skills, educational resources can be invaluable. This can be helpful when you have a client that is motivated, but needs some extra resources, or when you have limited session time and want to give them an extra spoke in their wheel to gain some momentum. As a couples therapist, I love pointing my couples to books by The Gottmans such as “8 Dates” or “Fight Right”, because they supplement our work and give clients a template they can follow outside of sessions.

• Reading Assignments: Suggest relevant articles, books, or chapters from books in order to increase their understanding, or give them a guide for coping skills you’re working on. 
• Online Material: Recommend pertinent online courses or webinars. Many Licensed Mental Health Professionals have mini courses available that tackle a variety of presenting problems. These can bridge the gap between sessions if time is limited.

2. Helping Clients Remember Their Homework

Reminder Notifications

Even the most motivated of clients are vulnerable to simply forgetting to do their homework. As therapists, we can support them by helping them set up a reminder system. In today's world, we can leverage technology to help clients remember their assignments:

• Calendar Reminders: Advise clients to set reminders on their phone’s calendar for specific homework tasks. Make sure they turn on the “alert” so they don’t miss it.
• Productivity or Tracking Apps: Recommend apps like Todoist or Google Keep, where they can list and track their therapy homework. Habitbetter Pro sends reminder notifications to your client directly via their app for their therapy homework, and logs every time they complete a task. It even reminds them of the what, how, and why!‍

3. Keeping Clients Accountable

Collaborative Progress Updates

One of my favorite things my own therapist did for me was set up an accountability system for my homework. This included messaging him when I completed the task, and jointly monitoring how many steps I took towards my goal. Accountability can help your clients overcome the hesitation that comes with doing something novel. It helps them feel less alone, and reminds them that you are in their corner, cheering them on between sessions. You can maintain accountability with collaborative methods to monitor progress:

• Shared Communication: Use a HIPAA-compliant messaging system, like HabitBetter Pro’s, to share progress and updates. 
• Progress Tracking: Engage clients in monitoring their own progress as a way of building their own accountability to their goals. With Habitbetter Pro, clients and therapists can access a daily and weekly habit log that calculates progress towards their goals, as well as mental health measures and check-ins so they can visually see how their mental health improves along the way.

Putting it together

Assigning effective therapy homework is all about creating meaningful, manageable, and motivating tasks that align with each client’s unique needs and mental state. By categorizing assignments into behavioral changes, processing prompts, and educational resources—and using reminder tools and collaborative platforms—you can significantly enhance client engagement and outcomes.

Be a thought partner in your client's therapeutic journey. Equip them with the right tools and strategies to foster accountability and continuous progress, both inside and outside the therapy room. Your innovative approach will empower clients to take active roles in their own healing and growth.

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