Schedule an appointment for the dentist!

Call mom!

Finish the paper for your least favorite class!

Meet up with a childhood friend!

Eat your greens! And the list goes on.

There are tons of things to keep track of as a student, and sometimes it can feel like you’re never really off, because work, studying and life just never sleep.

But a happy life is a healthy life. So how do you maintain and manage a healthy work/life and study balance? We’ll pitch you a few ideas…

Figure out your peaks

Do you rise together with the sun, bright and early, or are you more of a night owl? Regardless of where you find yourself on the spectrum, we all have times during a day where we are more motivated, productive and awake.

By identifying your peak time of the day, you’ll be able to take advantage of it and check off a lot of tasks on your to-do list.

Identify your happiness

Being busy with work, studying, doing laundry, buying groceries, answering emails and all the other things connected to #adulting, you can easily become overwhelmed. To maintain a healthy and happy life/work balance, it’s crucial that you identify what makes you happy and even more so, that you remember to include happiness activities in your days.

Do you keep your calm if you go for a long walk with a podcast in your ears? Does working out help you stay healthy and happy? Do you feed off being together with loved ones?

Whatever floats your boat, make sure that you include and make time for happiness activities in your schedule to stay sane and keep away stress and sadness. No one needs to be working or studying 24/7.

Schedule, plan, organize

The best tool to stay focused, be a superhero and manage to do multiple things in a day that require you to both study, work and stay happy? The to-do list. You need to find your preferred way to stay organized, but one way to do it is to sit every Sunday night and get an overview of what the coming week looks like.

What do you have to do? What do you need to prioritize? What do you already have scheduled?

Get an overview of your week and then take the next step and plan your work, your studying as well as your happiness activities.

When you have finished scheduling your weekly plan, it’s time for the day-to-day to-do list. You can either write your to-do list the night before or you can do it in the morning. Some people prefer to do it the night before, so they can sleep safe and sound knowing that everything they need to remember is already down on the to-do list.

The to-do list makes it so much easier to sit and get down to it while knowing exactly what you need to do in a day.

Create a workspace

Just as you’ve identified the activities that give you energy and make you happy, you need to identify where you’re being most productive and focused. Is it home alone? In bed? By a desk? At the CBS Library? Or at a cafe?

We’re all different, which means that working at a laptop-friendly cafe might work for one whereas working and studying from home works better for you. To each their own. What is important is that you create a workspace that works wonders for you and your focus in order to check off your to-dos.

Remember: You’re good enough!  

With a life full of long to-do lists, you’ll have days when you’re super crazy productive, almost as if you had wings to fly with. And you’ll have days when you simply can’t find your focus and have a hard time getting done what needs to be done. That’s life. It’s all a balance and it’s important to keep in mind that in order to have good days, there must be bad days.

Instead of mocking yourself if you’re not able to perform how you want to perform, embrace the low-energy days and remember to be kind to yourself on those kind of days. If you don’t manage to wipe out all your to-dos, remember that tomorrow is another day that might just be the day when you feel like you have wings.

Hopefully, these ideas will help you become your most happy, yet productive, version of yourself, so you’ll be ready to knock the work/life/studying balance firmly into shape.