If you’re balancing a crazy-busy work and study schedule, life is most likely starting to feel overwhelming. Whether you’re undergoing hospitality courses or training to become a brain surgeon, it can be easy to let your social life, work-life and even your health become unbalanced and stressful. In this blog, we’ll discuss some ways to bring balance to your life, by setting out some organisational habits you can adopt.
Schedule EVERYTHING
Keeping a schedule is the first rule of organising your life, but there are many different ways to keep a schedule and—as it turns out—so many ways to get it wrong. A schedule should assist your daily life to make sure you’re making good use of your time. It should give you a holistic overview of the tasks you have ahead and allow you to plan just how and when you’re going to achieve them.
For this reason, we’re pretty sure the best way to make a schedule is to include everything in your life in it. This means not just study, but your social life, hobbies, breaks, everything in your day-to-day.
Start by plotting time to carry out your daily routine: include meals, travel time, the half-hour you spend putting on makeup – everything. Schedule your lectures and classes that are compulsory to attend, along with your job hours, and any other meetings, appointments or social calls that are going to take up time.
Next, set aside time each day for your health—whether that’s going to the gym or for a run, meditation, or simply setting aside break times so that you can recoup and re-centre throughout the day or week. Setting these things up in your schedule first means you’re being realistic about the amount of time in the day you actually have outside the time you need to take care of yourself!
Lastly, schedule your study hours in realistic time slots where you can see yourself achieving something, bearing in mind that every potential crunch-time distraction has already been scheduled for another time of day, so there are no excuses!
Avoid the Procrastination Hole
The tricky thing about scheduling is what comes next. Yes, you really do have to stick to it. You haven’t scheduled time to procrastinate, and the best way to not let yourself get sucked into the procrastination hole is just to get over it and realise you really don’t have that much time. Delaying things now is just going to lead to it piling up in the future, and because you’ve got everything scheduled out, you should be able to notice that your timeframe does not have space for that kind of chaos.
That doesn’t mean you can’t take breaks! You can stay productive (and trick yourself into avoiding procrastination) by doing things like setting alarms for yourself, taking 5-minute breaks after 20 minutes of solid study, using rewards and incentives, and setting achievable, small goals each day.
Lists are your best friend
Even once you’ve scheduled time and are ready to sit down and study, it can be hard to stay focused and achieve things if you have so many assignments, papers and modules running around in circles in your head.
Go into a study sesh with a decent list, full of all the tasks you’ve got to achieve both big and small. Even starting your day with a list of things that you want to get done—such as replying to that text or reaching a goal at the gym—can be a successful way to make sure your life stays balanced.
A list doesn’t stop once everything is on it. The most important part of list-keeping is to be realistic about how long each task is going to take to accomplish. Narrow down your list by prioritising the tasks you can realistically get done in the amount of time you have. Then, you can safely and securely tick off your list on time and without panic.
Know Your Limits
Every step along the way to living an organised life involves this one key aspect. Only you can know your tendencies to get distracted easily, the amount of time you can realistically sit and focus for, or your anxieties that will overwhelm you if you try to multitask.
Never forget to take these limits into account when you’re trying to organise your life. Be honest about them with yourself, and this way you’ll be able to prevent a whole pile of guilt that comes when you try to push yourself too hard.
Stay calm and collected with an organised life
A work-life balance is one of the most important things we can have for our mental health, and at Crown, we understand that. All of our hospitality and tourism courses are set out to be a positive addition to your life, to give you the tools you need to achieve your dream job and dream life!
To talk more about our courses and how you might be able to fit valuable education into your busy lifestyle, give us a ring today!
