How To Manage Workloads
- Tara Hodgson
- Oct 23, 2018
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 23, 2021
Hey! Tara here, and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and I also talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.
You have a lot going on between university, your hobbies, social life, any appointments and work. It feels like you don’t have a minute to yourself without rushing around, trying to work out how exactly you’re going to fit it all in. You feel like one wrong move and it’s all going to come crashing down around you.
So how do you sort it out? How do you keep juggling all of those different workloads and commitments?
Step 1: Get something you can use to plan time on. I use Google Calendar (which I’ve gone into in this post here) and a Bullet Journal (more detail here) to make sure I don’t forget how to do anything. Both of these together mean I know exactly what I’m doing and when, down to what I want to read and what progress I’ve made on my projects.
Step 2: Give yourself enough time between tasks so you can wind down from the previous one and prepare for the next one. This helps so much with not feeling like everything is happening at once.
Step 3: Learn when you should say ‘no’ to things. If you’ve had such a busy day and you know you should work on that project or hobby but you’re exhausted you can say no to it, this doesn’t mean you’re putting it down forever, just to the side for now. If you have an appointment you don’t think can be changed, speak to lecturers if it interferes with class time.
Step 4: Following on from the above step, remember that you can ask for help. If you have a lot of hospital appointments that might affect your academic work then talk to your lecturers, explain the situation and see what help is available for you. It might be extensions or extra tuition.
Step 5: Do little things like making a note of your achievements each day, or setting aside a time to meditate in the morning/evening, Having that time to yourself to reflect or set up your day is something that can help slow things down.
Step 6: Prioritise the important things. If I have a lot of things to do around the time of an essay being due I separate them into categories:
urgent and important
not urgent but important
urgent but not important
neither urgent nor important
The goal is to not let things get to the “urgent and important” stage, trying to get tasks done when they’re “not urgent but important”. You want to get those important things done as quickly as possible and as well as you can. Having them being ‘urgent’ runs the risk of you not managing to complete them to the highest standard.
Step 7: Can you delegate anything? Are you taking on too many things that you can pass off to someone else? If you’re part of a society don’t try to be the Head, the Treasurer, attend every meeting and be there for the new members. If you have people that can, get them to do certain roles.
These are just some lessons I had to learn, and did learn the hard way for some of them.
During my second year of Undergrad I knew I would be in hospital and then recovering at home for a while, but wasn’t sure how long. The only thing I did know was that it would make writing essays difficult and I would be missing an unknown amount of class. I spoke to lecturers about it, re-arranged some things. I also managed to get all of the essays done and handed in early that year, before the end of November because I had planned my time well, prioritised the essays and studying earlier in the year.
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