How to do everything, without going insane
Studying full time, while doing 24 hours of work a week across two jobs, and maintaining a social life is hard.
Nothing in in this post will be ground breaking, nor do I intend it to be. This is a simple, and hopefully effective guide that you can use when life "steps up a bit", whether its the same work,social and university as me or if your life is just a little busier than it was previously.
I will cover:
Introduction
A huge reason for wanting to attend university in the first place was the social aspect of University, so when I started to pick up multiple jobs during my final year, time got busy.
A quick background, I was on a four year course at University of Kent, specifically studying computer science and artificial intelligence. This blog post focuses on my final year of university. While I was continuing to work for my placement year company.
I was working an average of 24 hours a week, 4 hours with university based jobs, and 20 hours at in corporate London. This, on top of a Research Dissertation and one module a term was a lot. In order to handle the workload, and tasks I stuck to three core ideas, "Know your limits", "Guard your time" and "Compartmentalise". These principle are all very simple at face value, but it took me a little while to realise how they would all work together.
Know your limits
You must be honest with yourself on the time you have, and what you can achieve, while there isn't a "most important" principle among the ones listed, this was one of the toughest lessons I had learn.
Simply put, every one of us, has a limit, whether it be hours we can stay awake for, to how long we can hold a conversation, we all in one way or another have a point where "we just can't" anymore, if you're someone who has not yet discovered this limit, then you should give yourself a pat on your back. For the rest of us, when we're shuffling lots of tasks, and commitments it's important to consider how likely we are to be able to complete everything we have given ourselves to do on that particular day.
If you're anything like me, then you likely keep a calendar relatively up to date, with "loosely" defined time slots for specific tasks, or commitments this is a tool from Compartmentalise. This can work great to a certain extent, but what happens when you have 3 or 4 deadlines all occurring on the same day? What if you physically do not have enough time to do something?
Well, as harsh as it is, there will be a time you just cannot do something in the time you have, and it is incredibly important that you are honest with anyone relying on you, and more importantly yourself when this happens. If you are not, you could find yourself a victim of burnout, and this can be difficult to "get over".
Guard your time
Preventing Burnout should be your highest priority
Burnout is a finnicky problem, and something that you should be aware of when you're planning on pushing yourself. There is only so much you can do, and if you try to break this limit too many times, you will burnout, missing a single deadline will always be better than burning out and missing them all
The principle boils down to, once you know your limits, you know what you can and cannot achieve, similarly you should have an idea of the time you have to complete a given task. By ensuring you pre-block your calendar / make plans early you are able to prevent (to the best of your ability) the sudden changing or re-prioritisation of a task to the detriment of another.
Similar to a many computational algorithms, you should have some "overhead" for the tasks you have, if you know a task will roughly take 2 hours, add an extra half hour, if you know the delivery date is next week, aim for a day or two prior to the due date, you must remain flexible Life changes quickly, and you have to be agile, it will lead to increased stressed, but knowing you have that buffer to play with will minimise the costs.
Compartmentalise
Learn how to context switch it will be worth it
Knowing how to context switch will help you swap between "compartments", but also between tasks in that compartment. Are you waiting for a SQL query to finish? Why don't you start off that other task that you've been putting off. Are you waiting for some features to compute for your dissertation? Why don't you study for that quiz next week.
Context switching is a life skill that you will realise allows you to get the most out of your days.
Sticking all tasks, and feelings, into their respective compartments, allows you to concentrate on specific area of your life at specific times. In my case, by ensuring university was kept to university, it meant that work felt like a "break" for the day-to-day living of studying. Likewise, if work got particularly stressful my dissertation felt like a passion project at that time, which allowed for me to remain calm throughout an otherwise incredibly stressful time.
With each aspect of my life at the time (work, social and university (study)), I made sure to do my best to only think about one at a time, putting each aspect into its own "compartment" within my head and loose plan allowed me to context switch between the aspects without worry about what the other aspect was doing. This was only possible because university didn't depend on my work, and while my social life was closely tied to university at the time, I didn't share projects/teams with the people I socialised with.
But what about social?
I know, I know I promised talking to you about social life as well. When I first signed the contract extension for my part time work, I realised that my time I had available would greatly decrease, I knew what university demanded from me at the time (considered I already had two years under my belt), and having just completed a years placement I also knew what professional work required of me.
So when it came to social? How do I manage that. I got a lot of advice throughout working and studying on this a lot of online sources will tell you academic and professional commitments come first, and this is true, but humans are naturally social animals, most of us require this, in order to thrive, you must include your social life into time, **do not feel afraid to push back on something just because its colliding with something for yourself.
You've been looking forward to that pub trip with your mates all week, and now priorities have changed? Push back, you need that time and you will risk other commitments and tasks if you are not careful.