Maximum concentration on work was at the peak of fashion for a very long time, and young professionals working in different firms bragged to each other about how long they did not take a vacation. If you took a vacation for the last two years, then it was considered that you’re underworking, and your career was not so interesting to you. This attitude to work as the boundary between work and personal life has moved from professional to educational field. For a long time, college and university students also felt it was right to work hard, to take as many courses as possible in one period. Now the focus has shifted much more to work-life balance. And this is right and good, because the principles that we talked about before did not lead to increased productivity, but to an unhealthy toxic work environment—anxiety, depression, and even suicide or death from overwork. In this article, we want to tell you how to balance school work and social life in college. And speaking of balance, we are not talking about how to stop studying and start having fun, and not about how to leave friends and start doing only writing papers, but about how to find a point where things get done, but at the same time you have the opportunity to both relax and have a healthy social life.
Getting Things Done. Have you Heard About it?
We do not urge you to do everything in one week that you should do in the near future. Getting Things Done or GTD is a management system of your time. It is more than 20 years old, and has proven itself well for both professionals and students, and for people who just want to organize their lives. The first step of this system is to write down all the cases that you have on a piece of paper, or in a notepad, or you can do it online and use Excel spreadsheets for this. The most important thing is to write down absolutely everything that you can remember—the smallest things, like picking up clothes from the dry cleaners, and the big things, like term papers, that you need to turn in next semester. It is believed that all this information occupies our RAM. At the same time, we constantly worry that we have forgotten something and will not be able to pay attention to urgent matters when the deadline comes. Therefore, we strongly advise you to start by writing down on a sheet everything that you have in your head. Already at this stage, you will feel that it has become easier for you and that a significant part of the feeling that you do not have time for anything and cannot afford social life in college came from a sense of anxiety, and not from reality. We recommend reading the book “Getting Things Done” to find out what the next steps might be.
Combine Studying with Socializing
You may not be the life of the party, but you still need to socialize, because college is one of those places where you find people with whom you will associate all your life, and who can be useful connections at stages of the professional path. This may sound selfish, but it’s true. People are a lot quicker to help their college mate, even if they weren’t good friends, than just some office worker. If you don’t like socializing through parting and don’t play computer games, try looking for studying groups, or groups dedicated to specific tasks. You will be surprised, but most likely there are groups on campus that write assignments together, and groups that are preparing for some projects together, and groups that are working on their future resumes, looking for internships and so on. The most important thing is to find those people who have the same goals as you. Even if they have slightly different methods, this is a great way to see how other people achieve their goals and share your experience with them.
Delegate Some of Your Assignments
You might say that the right way to improve your grades and speed up writing is to hire a tutor. In fact, a tutor is a long game, and if you want to set up school work and social life balance right now, then it’s easier and faster to delegate some of your assignments to professional custom writing services that will do everything for you. Here, you can hire experts with background in a required field and rest assured your paper will be written professionally. Of course, we’re not talking about outsourcing most of your academic work to someone else, but sometimes when you feel overwhelmed, it’s a good idea to hire an expert and move on to other tasks yourself. When you start working professionally in an office or online company, you will see that task delegation is one of the key ways to get things done on time.
In fact, it is very important to understand where your priorities are, and what tasks help you move forward, what tasks help you grow as a future professional and at the same time remain a healthy person who has friends, acquaintances, and a social life. Think of your goals as something global, and find local ways to achieve them. So, getting your degree on time is a much better goal than doing everything by the book. Staying a healthy person with a healthy mind and a healthy body is a much better goal than getting a perfect score in all subjects this semester. If you look at people in tech, in innovation, you know that their college grades were far from ideal, mostly not because they didn’t want to learn, but primarily because they focused on one topic, and devoted just it most of the time, delegating other tasks to experts, or just doing them somehow. Choose your prioritization strategy, and you will be able to achieve work-life balance in college.