Balancing Personal Goals and Homework

It’s basically inevitable that you will be busy in college. A main priority that will be keeping you busy is homework. Yes, you may also be involved in sports, clubs, or other of the many extracurriculars at Concordia, but regardless of which of these you do, you’ll always have homework. 
 

I’ll let you know that there are very few college students who decided to continue their education because of how much they enjoy doing homework. We all have our own ideas and interests that we’d like to pursue, but how do we make time for them with all of that homework?  Here are a few ideas that have helped me during my time at college. 

Write out what you want to do  

I talked a bit about planning in one of my subsequent blogs on time management. Mainly what I do is I write out what I want to get done on a given day. Usually, I have six goals that I write down. Three are school-related and three are related to my own interests. Personally, I just work on the goals I have time for and want to work on, rather than working on them in any sort of order.  Also, I don’t schedule when I’m going to work on one goal or another, but if that’s something you would do, you could do that as well.  

Make a checklist  

One other thing that I do that helps is to have these goals written in the form of a checklist. As I achieve each of my goals for the day, I check off the small empty box that I’ve drawn next to the goal. This helps me keep my goals organized and also makes me feel satisfied about what I’ve achieved.  

Be ready for other obligations that come up 

I should also address that other obligations come up. Some days I may have something that is not on my list of goals for the day that takes up time I wasn’t planning on dedicating to it. Usually, I can still get everything done that I hope to. In order to have enough flexibility for free time, I don’t build my goals into a schedule.The purpose of this practice isn’t to take up time, but to keep your own interests in mind in the midst of other obligations, so if you don’t get everything on your list done in a day, I wouldn’t worry about it. You should prioritize which things are more important to get done that day. If there are things that get pushed off until the next day, just do it then. However, if things get pushed off too far, I would consider reprioritizing or re-evaluating how much you want or need to do it so that you get it done. 

There are lots of ways to keep your personal goals and homework balanced, but the main tip I have for you is to plan which goals you want to work on for a given day. This will prevent too much of either from taking over your day.