How to Balance Your Side Hustle and Your Education
Side hustles are great for people who are looking to make a little extra cash, but they’re especially great for college students. Side hustles can give you work experience and skills that you can put on future resumes and applications. Of course with a side hustle, comes the ever-present problem; how do you manage it and your education, social life, extracurriculars, not to mention the(extremely important) time you take to rest? Well, it can be done with the help of two things: time management and knowing your limits.
Time management is an important skill to have not just in school or work, but in life. If you don’t learn how to manage your time based on what’s most important to you, you can find yourself floating from project to project and task to task without any real sense of purpose.
Now not every bit of advice on time management works for every individual, so I would advise you to do your own research on the subject, and try and find the methods that work best for you. However, I will give you a few basic tips to get you started.
Go to sleep earlier, get up earlier. I know you’ve probably heard it a thousand times before, but it’s true: if you go to sleep earlier and get up earlier, you really do get more done. Not only are you thinking more clearly because you got a good night’s sleep, but you have more time in the day to get shit done.
Get the little things out of the way first. If something takes you five minutes or less to get done, then get it out of the way first before anything else. Especially if it’s something you hate to do, otherwise it’ll be hanging over your head and bugging you all day, impeding your focus on work or school.
Schedule time for breaks. This may seem counterproductive, but trust me, you aren’t gonna get anything done if you’re suffering from burnout. It is so important to take breaks, even if it’s something small like getting water or a snack or getting up to go to the bathroom(although depending on how long you’ve been working you should probably take a longer break than that). Which brings me to my next topic: knowing your limits.
Like time management, knowing your limits is so important when it comes to life, not just school or work. You’ll lose a lot more time if you’re exhausted form burnout than if you had just stopped every once in awhile to take a break.
It’s ok to test your limits to try and figure out what they are, but once you have, and you know you’re reaching your limit: STOP. Drink some water, take a walk, watch tv or youtube videos, read fanfiction, do some yoga, play videogames, whatever works for you, but do it. I learned my limits my senior year in high school and it is a lesson I will never forget. I was a dual-credit student and I was on the path to graduate with my associate’s degree, and in order to do that, I decided to take five classes my last spring semester(more classes than I had ever taken in a semester at that point) two of which were science and math classes which were not my areas of expertise.
It was terrible. I was barely pulling a C in my science class, and the first test I took in my math class, I got an 8. Not my proudest moment.
I still managed to get my associate’s. I dropped the science and math class, and took them over the summer instead(one of the most stressful summers of my life, but that’s a story for another day) and still managed to graduate high school with my associate’s and attended the graduation ceremony the community college held. But that experience taught me a very valuable lesson: what my limits were, and to never go past them again.
It is entirely possible to balance a side hustle and your schoolwork, friends, clubs/organizations, rest, etc. etc. You just have to learn how to manage your time, and when to give it a break.
