“CEO Arike preorder/Pablo enterprises, currently ongoing undergraduate studies, friend to five hundred people, General secretary – faculty of God abeg, church exco and mother/father of two”
Sounds familiar? Ehn, maybe parenthood is a stretch but there\’s a big possibility that we\’re talking about you. Rearrange a few sentences and you\’ll realise that you fit right into the mould. We almost forgot the last but invisible line of the bio — “perpetually exhausted student”. When was the last time you genuinely answered ‘fine’ to ‘how are you’?
Between attending classes, coding/ghostwriting/running a business, studying and keeping up with friends, twenty-four hours is never enough. You\’ve found yourself doing opportunity cost with your sleep. Sure you are doing well financially but at what cost? You have about two hundred slides that you\’ve not even started reading and the bags under your eyes have turned to ghana-must-go. Don\’t lie, on the days it gets a little too much, you Google things like ‘how to find a sugar daddy/mummy’.
It has now become a pick-your-poison situation;
Good grades + work + social life = little sleep and terrible mental health.
Work + social life + mental health and good sleep = terrible grades
Good grades + excellent work life + mental health = no social life.
Good grades + social life + mental health = no work. No work in this economy?
Omo. None of these equations are favourable. You want to have fun but you don’t have time. You are afraid the fear of sapa and getting your degree is slowly eating into ‘the best years of your life.’
What will you do now ehn fine girl/boy? A work-life-grades balance is possible and TFS is here with tips to help you escape the matrix. Walk with us;
1. Have a schedule: Life is not one big jangi lova epo moto. You can\’t keep on ‘going with the flow’. When you have six things to do simultaneously, you can\’t just decide to start with work and then do the remaining things later. Work will eat into studying time and before you know it, the day has finished and you\’ve done everything but study. Then you start trying to study when it\’s time to sleep. Sharing your time lets you know that you are on a deadline and work tends to be more efficient when you have one.
2. You can\’t do everything: Dear overachiever, as blasphemous as this sounds, it is true. You can\’t work two jobs, do well in school and still do all these extracurriculars you are packing on your head. Besides taking orders and battling demons, you still want to be faculty president. Are you trying to kill yourself? You are going to have to make a priority list and distribute your time among the most important things on your list. When your time can\’t accommodate the rest of the things on the list comfortably; we know you don\’t want to hear it but those things have to go.
3. Normalise going into focus mode: Texting your boyfriend and doing your assignment is counterproductive, Molade. Focusing on a task and completing it before moving to another optimises your time. Splitting your time between two things at the same time will only make you get tired faster. You are not multitasking, you are really just stressing your brain. In the end, you\’d have done half of everything, finished nothing and nobody is happy. Not you, not your clients and definitely not the assignment due in a few hours.
4. Stop procrastinating: No, you don\’t work best under pressure. Can we all stop lying to each other? Leaving tasks to pile up will only give you anxiety. You\’ll be in PCH 311 and the lecturer’s voice will turn to background noise because you are thinking of the money you were supposed to withdraw out of the church\’s account yesterday. Now pastor Timothy is texting you and you regret wasting the two hours you could have used to run the errand scrolling through twitter. By taking care of tasks immediately you can ensure that they don\’t spill into each other.
5. It\’s okay to take a break: You can tell your clients that you are taking a day off. You won\’t die if you don\’t go to class today. It\’s not like you\’ll listen in the class anyway, we both know you didn\’t sleep last night.
6. Sleep!: and know your own limits. Know what you can and can\’t do. There\’s very little you can do with a migraine. You are working on an empty tank if you keep going through life without sleeping well.
Before you know, you are depressed, losing weight and taking medication for migraines.
Burnout and depression is real. You keep powering through until you can\’t anymore. Here\’s a reminder to slow down and create balance before you balance unbalances your mental health.
If you\’ve successfully achieved balance, let us know what else you did to get to where you are in the comments.
We hope this helps 🧡
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