Excellent Tips for Balancing School and Work as an Adult
A desire for learning something new throughout your life is an outstanding quality and if you have it, you are very fortunate. You might have completed your standard education and are now doing a job, have your family and children and responsibilities towards them, but still you want to learn a new skill; for example, you may want to advance your Nursing Degree. So, you are now wondering if you can keep a balance between school and work. But here are tips with which you can do that easily.
Time Management
When you have many duties to do and learn a new course simultaneously, you first have to do an excellent time management. For this, you have to schedule your time flexibly. Of course, you cannot do that with your entire schedule and some part of it will remain inflexible, e.g. your working times and class times. Build a timetable in such a way that you can stick to it, but can make adjustments if some emergency occurs. As a working adult student, you should be prepared to adapt to unexpected tasks, new assignments and abrupt work crises that should be taken care of immediately. Don’t forget to include sufficient study time in your timetable so that if something different occurs, you can move it into another time block in the same week and complete your week’s study.
Tools You can Use to Schedule Your Time
Calendar: Write what you want to do each day on a calendar. When you are done with a job, strike it off. This will enable you to see how much you have completed and can organize your future tasks.
Planner: If your days are full of appointments and so varied that it’s problematic for you to keep a track of your timetable, a planner is of a lot of help. Fill in it all your appointments that cannot be changed, such as work times, class times, familial duties and due dates. This will make you aware of your free time with which you can schedule study sessions or recreation.
Smartphone: Today smartphones have become tremendously useful as a planner and calendar. You can save your to-do list in your smartphone. Android phones and iPhones can sync with your desktop and laptop computer enabling you to schedule between your devices. If you add a new assignment or a due date for class, for example, it will automatically be entered in your home computer too.
Develop Efficient Study Habits
Once you schedule your time for study and separate it from your other responsibilities or to-do tasks, you have to develop study habits that will make the most of that time. Here are some tips.
Organization: You should first organize all your study materials. Keep it classified and neatly arranged so that you can find the desired one on time. Mark future deadlines on your planner or whichever tool you are using for planning, and start projects beforehand to get enough time to finish them on time, in case anything else arise in the middle of them.
Taking Notes: Listen to the lectures carefully and identify what the main ideas are to leave out unnecessary information. Concentrate on noting summary statements that are concluded by steps in larger processes, information repeated by your professor, and everything mentioned in handouts or on the board. This information will be drawn by your professor for your tests; so, concentrate on it.
Study in a Quiet Place: Find a place where you will not be disturbed or diverted from studies. Check if you have a comfortable table and chair, all the study materials at hand and sufficient lighting.
Ward Off Distractions: When you study, your phone, TV or other gadgets can become a great distraction. Better keep your phone switched off and ensure that the sound of TV won’t reach your study room.
Keep Regularity and Avoid Cramming: Study from your first day of course and keep it regular, instead of procrastinating up to the last days and cramming the work of a month or more in a single study session. That way, your brain cannot deal with all the work in a short time. Remember that your brain is a muscle. You know that the strength of a muscle increases with small but regular exercise and not by exercising only once for many hours. Same way, your brain too becomes strong if it is given exercise regularly and not only once.
Discussing with Professors: If you don’t understand a topic, try to contact your professors and request to explain again. If you create an open discussion with your professors, it will remove the hurdles you face in a class soon.
Develop Efficient Work Habits
As you want to develop a balance between your studies and work and develop efficient study habits, you also want to develop efficient work habits. So, here are some tips.
Make To-do Lists: There would be some easy tasks for you as well as difficult ones. Make two separate lists for them. These may contain replying emails, submitting forms, attending meetings and other things to be done in a day.
Identify Priorities: Keep the most important tasks on the top of your lists and arrange all the tasks in a descending order of priorities. If you find any tasks that are unimportant, eliminate them. Don’t waste time on any fluffy work. Or else, it will harm your productivity.
Keeping Work Space Organized: If you want to increase your productivity, keeping your work space organized is very important. This includes decluttering, strategic organization and keeping up that organization. Dispose of things you don’t need. Shift anything that can distract you in another room. And keep your work space clean.
Employ the Power of Teamwork: Divide tasks into manageable parts and distribute each part to your team members. Don’t spend days to achieve a task which a team can complete in a few hours.
Manage Stress
It’s easy to get stressed up while encountering with so many duties. In that situation, you have to learn to deal with stress. Keep school and work separate. Don’t think about the other while you are into one. Don’t mix up the two. You should make justice with both, so give your 100% to what you are in, it may be your work or school. Take breaks too. Have tea or go for a walk or read a storybook. However, you shouldn’t prolong the break for more than 5 or 10 minutes. Also remember to exercise and meditate. These are the most effective ways to manage stress.
Founded by a group of Nursing Educators a decade ago, Career Learning Centers is aimed at delivering a quality learning experience to healthcare professionals who select independent non-traditional learning to get an Associate in Science Nursing Degree leading them to their RN Certification and upgrading in their profession. CLC has developed an interactive Online Nursing Degree classroom environment which encourages learning, measuring knowledge and ensuring results in the learning process. Visit their website to know how you can learn new skills in medical profession simultaneously while doing a job.
