When you are focused on study, it is sometimes difficult to achieve and maintain a healthy balance between your schoolwork and your home life. Sound familiar? Are you struggling to keep afloat with life at home and studying for exams? The following are some pointers that will help you maintain a healthy school-life balance.
Keeping Finances Up to Date
The old saying that a stitch in time saves nine could not be more apt when it comes to your finances at higher education. In order to finance the high cost of college you can look at sources like private lenders to ensure your peace of mind. That way, you aren’t scrabbling for money when something unexpected happens and you don’t have to make repayments until after your graduate.
Scheduling
You’ve had it since you were a young child – a schedule that dictates what you should be doing and when for how long. The reason that this concept is so universal is because it works, and making sure you know what deadlines you have coming up and which parts of your dissertation need to be submitted by when is a great way of ensuring you have time for relaxation activities. During heavy examination periods, make sure to schedule in food, exercise and rest as well.
Avoid Perfectionism
This happens with a lot of students regardless of their age – expecting perfection with every assignment is like trying to insist that every date you go on will yield the love of your life. It is a wildly unrealistic expectation. This isn’t a suggestion to settle, absolutely not, but perfect being the enemy of the good is something to bear in mind, especially when you are struggling with a concept. Try as hard as you can, get everything in on time, and be optimistic but don’t expect miracles from yourself or you will constantly be let down and that will impact your mental health significantly.
Honesty with Time Allocation
Nowadays there are plenty of tools you can use to evaluate your time spent on social media when you should be studying, or playing videogames when you should be reading up ahead of a seminar. Being honest with yourself and your capability is an amazing step to ensure a balance, especially when there is a “just one more” attitude to watching videos online. Measure your regular amount of time and, if you are not spending as much time studying as you need to improve your grades, then reduce that time. Similarly, if you know that you can write five hundred words in a twenty-minute period, for example, then expecting yourself to write a 4,000-word essay in two hours is wildly unrealistic. Be honest with your time and adjust appropriately.
Prioritization
It’s sometimes easy to prioritize the easy to clear work over the bigger or longer pieces because it gets them off your plate, but if the deadline for the bigger piece is coming up quicker than that of the smaller or easier pieces, you really need to adjust your planned workload. Just because a piece of work is scarier is not a reason to delay it – if anything it’s a reason to put it first on your schedule. Try to get the worst or most awkward bit out of the way so you can carry on with the work you find more enjoyable.