Finding the Perfect Balance Between School and Personal Life
Despite the pandemic’s effects, it is still entirely possible to maintain a proper balance between your school and personal life.Here are a few tips to effectively find this balance and improve your well-being during these stressful times. Some tips include preparing a schedule for the week, staying organized, and rewarding yourself appropriately.
Throughout high school, I used a physical planner for all my homework, and having something tangible helped. In college, my life is very scheduled. Most days I have classes, my part-time job, club activities, and other events. After being in college for a couple of months, I realized that it is easier to make a Google Calendar on your school account and link everything there. I have different calendars for classes, work, exams, and free time.
They send you alerts, personalize different classes in different colors, set reminders for assignments that are due, and share your schedule with your team to show open availability which is very useful. Since my days have stretches of free time, sometimes I would wake up, assuming that I have nothing scheduled, and dive into a season of Emily in Paris for six hours – only to realize later that I’ve missed a meeting or an assignment that was due. For that reason, one of the first tasks of my morning routine is to check my calendar. I make sure this happens every morning, so I don’t run into any surprises.
It feels good to reach milestones in your life, especially in college, with major projects and assignments. All the work you have put in has proven to pay off; it makes you feel good and successful. It’s fantastic that you did well, but there’s no harm in a little more motivation to drive you forward as you work through your objectives. That’s why I believe in rewarding yourself, even if that just means watching a movie in bed or cooking your favorite meal. I realized that by rewarding myself, my brain loves these positive emotions, which makes me know that if I put the effort in, and get results, it results in a positive reward. After doing this continuously, my brain began to link pleasure to accomplishing a task or goal, knowing I’ll reward myself in the future.