Is it possible to balance a personal life, education, and work? The key to success is proper time management and everything related to this skill. Based on the feedback of students who manage to catch up with all their activities, we have come up with the list of tips that may help you to achieve a perfect balance.
Update Your Schedule on a Regular Basis
To catch up with everything you’ve planned, you should make friends with calendars and organizers as well as improve time management skills. Numerous software and applications for mobile devices will help you with this task. As your education matters most of all while you’re a student, begin filling out the calendar with the due dates for your assignments. Start with the most urgent ones. It will help to avoid procrastination.
There are several important tasks for any student that dominate. Set priorities wisely while planning your schedule. For instance, you may dedicate more attention to the following activities:
- Homework
- After-class activities
- Part-time job
- Internship
- Hobbies
- Parties
- Laundry
- Gym
- Etc.
Working as a waiter or in retail may collapse your plans a bit. The shifts may be changing all of a sudden. The good idea would be to develop your schedule when you agree on the specific working hours and dates. If you see that you lack time for some academic assignments, use an essay writing service that will help to catch up with your tasks.
Set Your Priorities
If your English club matters more than your music lessons, mention it somewhere in your schedule and try to make sure that you have more time for the first one. Also, various academic projects may sneak up on you from time to time. Always read the syllabus for any assigned tasks even if you have to submit them closer to the end of the semester. Sometimes, it is better to delegate small tasks like essay writing or case study to someone else and focus on large-scale projects that will predetermine your final grade. While you can think about skipping a small essay assignment, there is no way to fail to submit a serious work as a term paper or coursework.
Check out how many points or credits every assignment weighs. Examinations can also make the difference of a full letter grade, so, if they are upcoming, study more for them – do not waste time on tasks that weight less than 10% of the final grade, for instance. A well-written exam can save your day. Experts recommend moving on to the simple tasks later once you’re sure you are done with the difficult ones.
Never Postpone Anything to the Last Minute
Procrastination is the worst habit of a student. While you know that you can submit your term paper or coursework by the end of the term, it does not mean you can relax and wait until the last week to write 20, 50, or even more pages and prepare a presentation with persuasive speech. It just does not work this way!
Once you obtain a long-term writing project, sit down and plan it step-by-step as soon as it is assigned. At least, you will need to create an outline and think how much time every section will take to complete. Develop a schedule then best on these estimates and your best guesses. Also, think about the order of work. Experts recommend working on the body of a paper first and write the introduction and thesis statement in the last turn. It is impossible to underestimate the role of proper time management for students. You may pass a free online course in it to improve your skills.
Never Multi-Task
Young people are not grown-up entrepreneurs who can handle several different tasks at the same time. Usually, if you start doing more than one task at once, you lose the quality of work. Especially if the activities you plan to join are from different fields, you should better do them one-by-one. Of course, there are some exceptions.
Many students successfully proved that they could do both their homework assignments and listen to their favorite music. You can view the list of music for studying on this website. However, talking with your friend, watching a movie, and writing a research paper is not the best idea. You will most probably end up with a messy paper, the wrong impression from the movies, and no idea what your friend was talking about.
There are times when you risk failing to catch up with everything. Procrastination may not even be the fault. As it was mentioned above, you can use the help of your family, pals, or professionals. It is still way better than risking to have everything done at the worst level.
Do Not Forget to Take Breaks
In other words, plan your rest just as seriously as you plan your education and work. Every student has a right for a personal life. Try not to do anything on weekends. Thus, it is better to do a bit more during the week to forget about your studies and job at least for a couple of days.
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