Tips to Help You Manage the Competing Demands of Work and Study

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If you’re working and going to school at the same time, managing the competing demands of your two roles can be quite the challenge.

As you probably know, time is one of your most valuable resources, and working and studying both eat up a lot of it!

By following the tips below, you can regain control of your time and balance your job and studies more effectively.

Do These Things To Manage Your Work and Studies

1. Use Spike for communication and collaboration

Whether you have to collaborate on projects at work with your colleagues, or at school with your peers, you need the right tool for team collaboration, and Spike is just that tool.

Spike is the world’s first conversational email app that takes your boring old email threads and converts them into chat-style conversations, making emailing back and forth as smooth and natural as instant messaging or texting.
Conversational email removes the repetitive content from email threads and cuts down on the stuff formalities of emailing, but that’s not the only reason working students like you should be using Spike.

This powerful all-in-one communication and collaboration platform is full of other features that you can use to get more done in less time, including built-in voice messaging, video meetings, collaborative notes, tasks and to-do lists, group chats, and more.
What makes Spike so ideal for balancing work- and school-related communication and collaboration is that you can do it all from one unified location, instead of switching between a dozen or more apps and screens to do different tasks.

Since you don’t have to spend so much time switching contexts throughout the day, you’ll have a lot more of it actually to get things done!

2. Don’t push your health and wellness to the side

When you’re going back and forth between school and a job, it can be hard to find time for other things, like exercise and other wellness-related activities.

However, if you don’t take care of your physical and mental health, it’s actually harder to stay productive at work and school.

So, make sure to incorporate some wellness-promoting activities into your routine, even if it’s just a short walk every day, going to the gym three days a week, or getting in a home session of yoga.

In terms of mental health, try to devote at least 30 minutes every day to doing something you enjoy, whether reading a novel, listening to music, playing video games, or painting.

3. Use downtime productively

With a job and a study program to balance, you need to optimize your time by using downtime to do something productive.

For example, if you ride public transportation to attend your classes, you could use this time to study or create a to-do list for work. Or, you might use some of your lunch break at work to get ahead on a school project.

The more effectively you use your down time, the less overwhelmed you’ll feel with everything you have to do.

4. Set milestones for yourself

Milestones are mini goals that you can use to break up large projects into smaller, more manageable tasks.

Try creating to-do lists for both your job and your study program, and break down every big, long-term goal into multiple milestones you can complete in shorter time.

As you complete tasks and check milestones off your lists, you’ll feel a lot more on top of everything, and suddenly those big goals will seem much closer and more achievable!

5. Work together with classmates

Getting to know other people in your study program and collaborating with them is a great way to share some of the workloads and help each other out

For example, you might be able to organize a study group that meets in person or online and share and collaborate on notes.

6. Communicate with your manager

If you’re studying while holding down a job, there may be certain times when you need to work less to focus on studying for an important exam or completing a big project
It’s important to communicate these things to whoever manages you at work, so they know what’s going on with your studies and, hopefully, are willing to compromise with you and give you time off or a lighter schedule when needed.
Just make sure to communicate with your manager well in advance when you know you’re going to be swamped with your studies so they have plenty of time to reallocate any of your responsibilities as needed.

Wrapping Up

Whether you’re working a part-time job while in university full time, or working a full-time job and going to night school, balancing the competing demands of work and study is bound to be stressful and hard at times.

Following the suggestions above should go a long way towards making this balancing act easier and allowing you to reap the full benefits of working and studying at the same time!


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