How to Balance Work, School, and Social Life

One of the biggest challenges college students face is in keeping a healthy work-life balance. While there are many different ways to ensure a good work-life balance, I think what it comes down to is how much time you would like to spend in your work life, school life, and social life. For example, I like to spend 50% of my time throughout the week doing schoolwork, 30% doing work-related activities, and 20% engaging in social activities. From a time perspective, my day begins at 8 AM and ends at 10 PM (a 14 hour day). And so on a typical day, I would spend about 7 hours attending classes, doing homework, and participating in other school activities such as attending club events, e-board meetings for the organizations that I am a part of, etc. I spend about 4 hours working (a part-time job which is about 20 hours a week) and about 3 hours socializing which includes spending time with friends, family, and other fun activities. This breakdown varies from person to person depending on their priorities and the responsibilities they have.

Once you have a breakdown of your time, you can make a schedule based on the tasks in each of your priority categories every week. You can also add a category to put the tasks that either you could not finish or are not due within the week. For example, here’s how I would make a list of my tasks for each week:

The next thing you must do is make time blocks to finish those tasks and fit them into your schedule. This technique is often called block scheduling, it’s where you have several time blocks and you fit your tasks into those blocks. Now, instead of thinking or spending time on what you want to do in the next hour, you already know what you need to be working on. Here’s an example of how I break my tasks down.

Just like Monday in my example, you can repeat the same thing for all 5 weekdays and even weekends. Every Sunday, I would sit down for at least 30 minutes to make sure I have my tasks scheduled for next week and if there was something I couldn’t finish; I now can adjust my schedule accordingly to fit that task into the next week. Although I have 1-hour blocks in my schedule, if you prefer, you can also do 30 min blocks, 1.5-hour blocks, or even 15 min blocks depending on how detailed you want to be with scheduling your tasks.

TIP: For keeping your tasks list organized, you can also use various apps such as “Microsoft To-Do” to categorize each list and also set up when each task is due. For the block scheduling, you can also utilize Google Calendar (my personal favorite) to put your schedule in there so that you have access to it from anywhere rather than the schedule being just in your paper planner.

Although you will now have a schedule along with clear boundaries, there will be times where you will be tested on your set goals and schedules and where you will have to make some sacrifices. As someone who loves to socialize, I sometimes have to say no to friends if going out with them will mess up my schedule.

Lastly, revisit your breakdown once a month to see how successful you were in terms of spending your time and balancing between work, school, and social life. Were your goals met? If not, what are some things that you can change that will help you to maintain that balance?

Written by Abhi K., a Rutgers—Camden Undergraduate Student and Raptor Ambassador.