If you have ever experienced academic burnout before, you know the cycle. It starts with a mountain of tasks to complete in what feels like not enough time. You stare blankly at your highlighted to-do list, baffled by how you are going to do anything but work. Soon enough, you can’t find time to eat, sleep or do the hobbies you love and your completely consumed by the stormy cloud of looming work.
This was how I felt last year in the run-up to my A-level exams. For months, I saw the seemingly impossible volume of work in front of me, and I didn’t even know where to begin. I had expended all my energy earlier in the year until I was left feeling like a car with an empty fuel tank.
After months of struggle and stress, I knew something had to change. I reinvented my lifestyle and the change in my health was positively incredible!
If your feeling anything similar to what I have described, your in the right place and I am going to share my fool-proof strategies for overcoming burnout.
Tip 1: Make a REALISTIC timetable
Now we all know that a timetable is useful for organising your time. But how many of us have integrated our other life commitments into it? This is the challenge I set for you. Make a timetable for each day of the week and add in your lifestyle events first. This can include: hobbies, social time, exercise, meal times and much more. The main thing is to add your non-negotiable events and then you can plan your study time around the things that mean the most to you.
This works because when you incorporate events that must go ahead for your physical/mental health, you have a realistic expectation of when work can be completed. Having blocked free time makes you feel at ease with resting rather than thinking about everything that you still need to get done. With a realistic timetable, you know that you can balance both work and life simultaneously.
Tip 2: Prioritise your tasks
When you have a mountain of tasks with due dates, it’s difficult to know where to start. Here is what I do to find a direction for my studying to make sure I use my time productively. Firstly, I write a master to-do list. It doesn’t need to be pretty or organised; it’s just a brain dump list with all the tasks you need to complete. Next, I go through and number the tasks in order of urgency. For example, if I have an assignment due tomorrow, then that becomes number one-my top priority. Once I have organised my tasks, I can plan accordingly, and the vast number of jobs becomes manageable, and I won’t miss any deadlines.