Balancing School with Work and Life
A different kind of conversation about work/life balance — from a high school student.
I’m grateful to have a unique perspective over my peers; I’m a grade 10 student with an office job in an industry I love. Furthermore, I have discovered a passion for this industry and now work daily towards furthering myself in it. You might remember a while back I wrote a piece about starting a company; I then went dark pretty soon afterwards. This wasn’t because I had given up, but because I was struggling to execute.
You see, as much as I would hate to admit it, school does take up time. And I was low on the ingredients needed to execute at the scale I wanted to, with none of the know how on where to begin. As a result, I floundered the last few months (something I’m certain many others my age and older do on a regular basis). But through a combination of pragmatic engagement with others, deep thinking, a sprinkle of luck, the help of my father and the words of Gary Vee — I broke out of it. Looking back on it, I realise that it took me the first half of the year to understand I can do it; and now it’s going to take me the next half of it to understand how to do it.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve made in this time is something extremely applicable for a huge number of people out there under eighteen. And that’s the lesson I want to reveal to you today.
#1: The Myth Of ‘Busy’
First, let’s do some basic maths; maths you’ve probably already seen but from a different perspective.
- There are 168 hours in a week.
- You need to sleep for 7.5 hours, not 9. A lot of health professionals are going to get trigged about this, and that’s okay because they’re full of horse shit.
- School goes from 8 to 3, and it takes ~1hr for transport. So call it eight hours.
- 168–(7.5*7)-(8*5) = 75.5hrs
Thats the non-optionals subtracted — now lets have a look at the slightly-less-mandatory things:
- It’ll take you 2.5 hours a day to feed and wash yourself and do your house chores
- You’ll need to spend an hour a day communicating with friends.
- 75.5–(2.5*7)-7 = 51hrs * 0.8 for error → 41hrs.
Forty one hours a week. That’s what you have. Now what are you gonna do with it?
You see, the maths is simple and the truth is sharp; you have more free time then you do have time in school/in the office. When you realise that this isn’t just bullshit, you can start to control your time correctly. An example; it’s not unreasonable to work from 4 to 8 every night Monday to Friday. That’s 20 hours right there. And what about your weekends? No reason why you can’t do 7am to 1pm both days, for a grand total of 32 hours working.
So, what was that about being ‘busy’?
#2: Daily Execution, Weekly Focus
This was the critical shift for me. Create a habit out of executing daily, Monday to Sunday. Write daily, push out content at a pace of 3–4 pieces a day. Push code to GitHub six times a day, work enough to make $50 a day.
But review weekly.
At the end of the week, check your stats. Add up how many likes you got, see how many new followers you have. Check the stats on your blog posts. Have a look at your bank account. Review your code.
You see execution happens in the moment. You don’t get things done over a week, you get them done daily and that accumulates. However, the mistake I made is thinking that I should be seeing the effects of that execution weekly. It can sometimes take months before you see positive effects of work. Especially when starting out, it’s important to not get too carried away with stats at a granular level.
However you must still review and learn from feedback; but do it at a longer time frame to your execution.
So my question out there for those U18’s; how are you balancing school? Whats your daily schedule look like?
How are you moving yourself ahead of your peers?