With so many activities to manage in today’s world, it can be difficult to balance everything and still have time to study. Balancing work and study can seem overwhelming, whether you’re a student working to pay your tuition fees and bills or taking a course to advance your skills or you are running a small business that demands your time, it is always challenging. There are tips that can assist you to handle and manage your time and also you can check my previous article on improving your learning when you can’t balance between school and side hustles.
Here are smart tips to help you balance your school and side hustles.
- Make sure you keep people around you updated.
If you run a business or work a part-time job, there will inevitably be days when your work and study schedules overlap. To prevent this, make sure your manager and coworkers are aware of all of your absences ahead of time, and as for your business, your friends and family who are your support team should be aware of your activities.
- Make a plan and stick to it.
A schedule is an excellent tool for determining your priorities and the amount of time needed to complete all of your tasks. The more detailed your calendar is, the more likely you are to stick to it. Fill in the gap with class times, work times, study times, due dates, appointments and other business activities. You’ll know exactly when you have free time and will be able to plan leisure, business and school activities accordingly. You can also color code your schedule list to make it easier to find by assigning a different color to each task/commitment or install a schedule list app that can keep you updated at all times.
- Turn your classroom into a business arena.
Choose courses or extracurricular activities that will assist you in running your business more efficiently or that will supplement it by forcing you to think in new ways. This can be accomplished by enrolling in classes directly related to your business.
- Concentrate solely on the task at hand
Remember that your to-do list influences how you work and complete your tasks, so stick to your plan once you’ve sat down to work on business-related tasks, don’t check your school email, disable notifications about study group meetings and upcoming class assignments that will distract you for that moment so that you can completely immersed in your business work.It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to turn off your business-side in the classroom, but you should try to separate the two as much as possible.
- Make a decision on what works best for you.
We are all unique and have different strategies that work best for us, so if you figure out what works best for you, for example, do you find that you are more active in the mornings or at night? Is there a difference in this depending on the project you’re working on? Is it easier to interrupt your workflow or switch locations or activities every few hours to remain energized? It doesn’t matter how you respond to these questions; what matters is that you know the answers and can use them to guide how you spend your time to improve your performance.
- Attend an class online
In most cases, you may miss some classes or have enough time when you simply need to do your business. You can skip some classes for some courses and watch or learn about it online while still passing your exams and keeping your business or job running.
- Prioritize the most critical tasks.
Determine which of your tasks are the most important and attack them first and hard. Other things may arise later in the day that will throw you off, so get the important stuff done as soon as possible.
- Forecast your activities.
Thinking ahead of time will ensure your activities don’t clash, making you have some hell of a week that is too stressful, so it is best to forecast how your week will go, what and what activities should be coming soon and where you will be on those days.
Incase you missed it, here are some secrets in improving your learning.