Balancing University and Personal Life

Beginning university isn’t guaranteed to be smooth-running. Pairing that with maintaining your personal life and allowing your new, budding social life to flourish can feel overwhelmingly difficult, if not impossible. This article focuses on facilitating balance between two of your life, and makes five main suggestions: realising the bigger picture, prioritising responsibilities and organisation, creating an optimal work environment and accepting your humanity; you will have off-days. 

Realising the bigger picture.

Aiming high academically is admirable, but focusing on scoring solely top grades, reading everything in sight that’s relevant to your degree, and devoting all waking moments to pouring all your effort into coursework in the pursuit of extreme, unending productivity will likely not award a sense of fulfilment. Even if this eventually leads to professional success, it will be to the neglect of your social and personal life. 

Productivity is more than career success; it is enriching your psyche with long-lasting, healthy relationships, or acknowledging your need for rest. This may take the form of simply sitting with your thoughts for an hour or two instead of absent-mindedly reading dense textbook chapters written by scholars. Coincidentally, socialising (by attending university socials, for example) can inadvertently benefit your career more than coursework, being a surefire way to connect with people in a similar field to you; inevitably helping you navigate networking later on. 

Prioritising responsibilities. 

Being productive in any sense of the word, though, requires doing the important stuff, and early on. This habit might be hard for some students to adopt, especially those in demanding degrees (regarding the amount of self-studying and reading required) - given that eager first-year students may prefer barrelling through one class’s entire reading list before thinking about the (very important) assignment for another, for the relief of knowing you’ve completed all work of one particular subject. 

However, this is not viable – burnout is easy to slip into. Thus, be strict with yourself, complete (or at least chip away at) tasks for classes you know are time-consuming or difficult, and leave easier, less important work for when your schedule frees up. Through nurturing this attitude, the choice of doing what you should be will soon become automatic. This will create a greater balance between university and personal life, with less brain power and free time going to complex tasks you need to rush through since you spent all last night re-writing unimportant lecture notes.

You can also power off the university side of your brain knowing the most pressing tasks have been acknowledged. This relates to staying organised. Operate in a way that will serve you best as someone working toward obtaining a degree and experiencing university life to the fullest. If you have plans to meet friends later, and an assignment due soon, shouldn’t you spend less time scrolling through TikTok before bed tonight? You will reap the endless benefits of planning in crucial moments, like those soon before assignments are due.  

Creating an optimal work environment. 

This ensures you get the most out of time devoted to studying, and will make it so bearable, it becomes almost enjoyable. Instead of throwing yourself into studying after a long day of using your brain, take a reasonable period to relax and eat. Refer to your list of responsibilities and decide what work is in greatest need of attention. Study in an area that is, mentally, separate from the rest of your home to avoid distractions (basically – don’t study in bed). Eliminate distractions (basically – hide your phone). If you struggle to focus, try different techniques: setting a thirty-minute timer you work for the duration of, and a five-minute timer you relax during, for example.

Accepting your humanity. 

Perhaps most importantly: remember days when you do virtually nothing are inevitable, and that it’s natural not to always be a perfectly balanced student. Even with an impeccable routine and work ethic, you will, at least once, end up getting very little to nothing you planned to do, done. And it’s not the end of the world. The shame you may try to force yourself to feel in response won’t fix the problem you think you caused by having an impromptu day off. So, take your time and accept you’ll bounce back. 

Adjusting to university and all it comes with isn’t always the easiest. But solutions exist. Thinking realistically about what will serve you best, considering what’s most important and tackling such in an organised manner. Additionally, creating an organised mental and physical space for doing such work, and accepting that sometimes, life happens, and you may slow down (perhaps quite a bit more than you intended to). Believing that this is normal will facilitate the balance between your personal and university life sneaking up on you all on its own.