Effective Tips for Balancing School, Extracurriculars, and Work (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hey guys. In today's video, I'll be giving you tips on how to balance school, extracurriculars, work, and anything else you do outside of school. To begin with, you want to make sure that you actually have enough time for everything. We're not Hermione. We don't have time turners. The way to do this is to estimate how much time you spend on things you have to do each week and how long you would spend on each activity. So this includes sleep, personal care like eating and showering, going to school, studying and doing homework for each class, and things you do for fun, and all of the activities that you want to do. Once you've got everything listed out, add it up and make sure it's less than 168 hours each week. If you don't have enough time in the week to do everything you want to do, you'll have to either cut something out or take easier classes that will take less time to study for or do homework for. Now on to actually planning for these activities, I'll be using a weekly planner printable that I made. I'll link it in the description. You can also use a bullet journal, a planner, or any other system you like. I find that there are two types of extracurriculars as far as balancing time goes. There are extracurriculars that only take up time and not necessarily tasks outside of the activity. For example, I spend a set amount of time in cross-country or track practice and at meets. These activities are the easiest to plan for. You just have to schedule whenever you have meetings, practices, or anything like that. The second type are activities that take up set time blocks and you also need to do outside tasks on your own time frame. For these tasks, you'll first also need to schedule out the things that have a set time frame. Then you also need to list out the tasks that you need to do. For example, I have choir rehearsal for a set time frame and then I need to sight read and practice music on my own outside of rehearsal. On this printable, I'm first using the section at the top to schedule out everything that has a set time. Then I list out my schoolwork tasks like homework and studying and the tasks that I need to do for each extracurricular in a box for each day. On certain days when I have a lot to do, I'll estimate how long it takes to do each task that I have listed. Overestimating is always better than underestimating. Then each task is scheduled as if it were a timed event, not just a task. This way, I have to finish it at that time and I cannot procrastinate. This is what works best for me, but if you're the type of person who chafes under schedules and deadlines, let us know in the comments what you find works best for you because I personally can't speak to that experience. I hope you found this video helpful, and if you'd like to watch more videos of mine, you can click on the cards on screen, and I post new videos every Monday and Friday. I also post daily on my Tumblr and Instagram, which are linked in the description. See you next time.