Advice on Balancing it All: Study, Leadership and Work
Balancing full-time study, leadership responsibilities, work, internships and a personal life is honestly one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced during university. Now in my third year and graduating soon, I’ve spent the last few years heavily involved in my club, serving as Vice President for two terms after originally joining as just a regular member (which I spoke about in my earlier blog post, From First Event to Vice President). While becoming VP has easily been one of the most rewarding experiences of my university life, it also became another major responsibility to manage alongside everything else.
Last year in particular pushed me to my limits. I was completing full-time study (4 units), balancing regular work, beginning an internship, managing club leadership responsibilities, extracurriculars and still trying to maintain some form of personal life. My internship and paid work alone added up to near 40 hours a week!
Very quickly, I realised that if I didn’t learn how to manage everything efficiently, burnout was inevitable. The biggest piece of advice I can give is simple: track everything.
Having alarms set for wake-up times and actually sticking to them makes a huge difference. I also relied heavily on to-do lists and colour-coded schedules because I’m a very visual person. For example:
Work: blue
Assignments due: red
Social plans: pink
It sounds small, but visually separating responsibilities helped me mentally organise my week and reduced the feeling of everything blending together.
One thing I learned early on was not to over-plan every single hour of the day. Personally, I found that more stressful than helpful. Instead, I focused on setting realistic goals within broader time blocks. For example, rather than planning every minute between 7pm and 10:30pm, I’d simply set the goal of completing at least two and a half hours of study during that time. That flexibility definitely made it easier to stay consistent without feeling overwhelmed.
And yes, as cliché as it sounds, sleep matters. A lot. As a psychology student, I’ve learned how important sleep is for memory retention, concentration and overall functioning. When you’re juggling multiple responsibilities, sacrificing sleep might feel productive in the short term, but eventually it catches up to you mentally and physically.
Another thing that became incredibly important was learning to be strict with myself. Procrastination is easy when you’re exhausted, but I started thinking more long-term about my decisions. I’d ask myself:
Is this going to negatively affect my sleep schedule?
Will this impact my mental health?
Am I going to regret not getting this done later?
If the answer was yes, I knew I needed to stop delaying it and just get started.
At the same time, maintaining friendships and personal relationships was still important to me, so I had to become intentional with my availability. Since I worked a typical 9–5 schedule, I’d dedicate specific windows for social catch-ups; such as anytime after 6pm on a couple of internship/work days, one day on the weekend, or blocks like Saturday mornings from 8am–1pm or Sunday afternoons from 1pm–5pm. Doing this helped me balance relationships without constantly feeling guilty that I “should” be studying or working instead.
I approached club responsibilities the same way. Sometimes I’d handle tasks during breaks, quickly respond to messages over lunch, or organise things before work so I knew everything important had already been communicated.
One habit that surprisingly changed a lot for me was planning out my time so I could arrive early to work.
Even just being 10-20 minutes early gave me time to mentally prepare, check club updates, organise my thoughts and avoid the stress of rushing in after spending too much time distracted on my phone at home. Starting the day calmly genuinely affected my productivity for the rest of the day.
I also can’t emphasise enough how much preparing the night before helped me.
Planning my outfit, packing my bag, prepping lunch, charging my laptop and leaving everything ready by the door saved so much time and mental energy in the mornings. Instead of rushing around trying to find my keys or remember what I forgot, I could simply grab everything and go. It seems minor, but reducing those small daily stresses adds up significantly when you’re already managing a heavy workload.
At the end of the day, balancing multiple responsibilities is never going to feel perfectly easy. There were definitely moments where I felt overwhelmed, exhausted, or stretched too thin. But learning how to organise my time, prioritise properly and create systems that worked for me made everything far more manageable and definitely reduced my burnout.
Being intentional with your time, your energy and best organising your priorities will seriously help!
Top tips dot pointed:
Track everything!
Set alarms for waking up (make them realistic, set multiple if you need to!)
Use to-do lists daily through an organised colour-coded schedule for the week and make sure you go over it at the end of the week to make sure you haven’t missed anything, or to figure out what could be improved for next week!
Don’t overplan your day! It’s not worth mapping out every minute, every hour of every day; it’s exhausting and can be overwhelming to stick to. Rather focus on viewing things day by day and giving yourself a set amount of hours to do things per day within a flexible timeframe.
Make sure you get adequate sleep (7-9 hours per night for those 19+), it’ll help with memory retention, concentration, mood and exhaustion levels. It’s never worth poorly impacting your sleep schedule for the illusion of productivity especially over multiple days!
Be strict with yourself, when you’re tempted to procrastinate, make sure you ask yourself if it’s worth impacting your mental health, stress levels and sleep for, if you’re really struggling, consider cutting down the time you’ve set for yourself that day, maybe instead of 2 hours of study, just drop down to 1 for the night and catch an early night instead for an early morning study sesh.
Dedicate time to social catchups, figure out what days work best for you and what times and block that out for people, for example pick a day on the weekend and what times are the best for you to work around. If you want to catch up with friends from 1 onwards, block out 9-12 for study!
Plan out your time effectively, no matter how this is. I personally use a weird method (google docs) to colour-code and lay out my days in a format that works for me, other people might prefer using google sheets/excel/calendar; whatever works best for you. Create a priority code, the closer things are due, the higher priority they are.
Arrive early to work so you have time to unwind, get yourself ready for the day and lay out your responsibilities for that morning. Even arriving 10 minutes early to work can give you time to mentally prepare, avoid the stress of rushing in after spending too much time distracted on your phone at home and start the day with a clear head.
PREPARE, PREPARE, PREPARE!! I can’t emphasise this enough! Get everything ready for the next day the night before; plan your outfit, pack your bag with what you can, have your items on charge ready to just quickly be grabbed off and popped in your bag, prep your meal for the next day and make sure your necessities (phone, wallet, keys) are in a consistent spot so you can just grab them and go rather than rushing to try to find everything or trying to recall if you've forgotten anything in the early morning.
Don’t rely on other people’s systems. I’ve heard so much about the Pomodoro method but for me it’s rather useless. Don’t be discouraged if methods like these don’t work for you because we’re all individuals and sometimes it’s more important to discover what strategy works best for you. I personally prefer to focus on something for 2-3 hours before taking a single break for 15 minutes as it helps keep me feeling productive rather than breaking out of ‘the zone’ every 20 minutes and impacting my progress.
Be proud of yourself! You’re doing a good job and even if you don’t feel productive at the moment or proud of yourself with your progress right now, there’s always room to improve and you live life at your own pace, I’ll be proud for you!
Reach out to me if you’d like advice on how to develop a template for time setting, there are options for hour-by-hour planning if you think that would work better for you, or just daily planning! (@deakin.socialclub Insta)
-Alina (Vice President ‘26)
