Imagine getting home from school after your club meeting at 4:15, then getting ready to leave for practice by 4:30 to get to practice on time by 5:00. You have practice until 8:15, but don’t get home until 8:45. Then you need to organize and prepare for a volunteer event you have that weekend for 30 minutes, as well as prepare for a tutoring lesson you are giving for another 30 minutes.
You calculate that you only have approximately 30 minutes to spend on homework per class if you want to sleep by midnight. But the classes you have to do homework for are AP Calculus BC, Honors Physics, AP US History, and AP Lang meaning that 30 minutes is nowhere near enough. And that’s only if you don’t plan on getting something to eat (you haven’t had anything other than a quick snack before driving to practice), or taking a break at all.
You can’t decide: should you skip homework, give up on trying to sleep by midnight, or start skipping practice?
Between hours of homework, sports practice, and trying to squeeze in a good amount of sleep, balancing the three seems to be a nearly impossible feat; but with rising pressure to be well rounded in school and extracurricular–all while trying to stay healthy and get a good night’s sleep–students often wonder whether or not this is even achievable.
Although it may seem preposterous to believe you can find balance between these three time-consuming activities, it is indeed possible, as long as you can prioritize your activities, and utilize your time efficiently.
Prioritizing is a crucial step in finding the proper balance between the overwhelming amounts of activities there are in a day. By creating a schedule based off of what you believe is the most important; you can take away stress and anxiety by finding organization in your busy day.
Stress and anxiety also lowers your overall efficiency level, which ultimately overwhelms you and causes trying to balance your schedule harder than ever. It is also important to be able to use your time efficiently, and make the most out of your time so that tasks are completed on time, making room for a healthy sleep schedule.
Whether that means cutting down time scrolling through your social media feed, or stopping your routine of Netflix and multitasks, it is necessary to focus on the task at hand in order to create higher quality work, as well as reduce the amount of time you take to complete it.
The thought of working harder to create a suitable schedule may sound distressing, and balancing responsibilities in life may be seem to take a lot of effort, but in the end, it will take you far.