In honor of beginning a new school year it’s important to set yourself up for success. From academics, sports, extracurriculars, jobs, and social commitments, high school students are often managing many different activities and classes. Having systems that allow you to balance school with other aspects of your life is important to maintaining emotional well being and reducing stress when managing numerous tasks. This article supplies you with tips and advice on how to stay on top of your work, while still having the chance to have fun or relax.

1. Stay Organized

Probably one of the most important aspects of achieving a healthy school life balance is being organized. Organization allows you to stay on top of your tasks, and manage the many facets of your life without having to remember everything yourself. This pertains to not just your school work, but your environment as well. Having a clean and organized room or space to study will affect your mood, decrease your feelings of stress, and make you less overwhelmed. Knowing where things are also saves you time and energy, so make sure to have a system to divide your classwork in your backpack by class, and have a clean space to do homework in your home to improve your focus and productivity. 

1. Manage Your Calendar

As you get older it becomes more important for you to keep track of your increasing amount of activities. Keeping a calendar up to date, whether it is online or hung up on the wall somewhere in your house allows you and your family to visually monitor when you need to be places and at what time. Online calendars can also send you notifications before your activity so you don’t forget, and can mark the locations of where you need to go for each commitment. You can even use calendars to help you time block your study schedule into manageable chunks, recording when you will study for a specific task and when you need to be finished and moving on to something else. This time constraint pressures you to stay focused on what you are working on instead of procrastinating.

1. Create a To Do List

To do lists are another great way to manage all of your assignments you need to complete without stressing about remembering them yourself. By writing your responsibilities down, you won’t forget to complete a task, helping you stay up to date on what you need to complete each day or week. To-do lists also serve as good encouragement when you make progress on each item on your list, with you getting to check off each completed endeavor as you finish. This system can also help you break up long term or hefty assignments into smaller chunks that you can complete each day to manage your time and motivate you to stay on track.

1. Practice Time Management

One of the most important tricks to balancing the many aspects of your teenage life is time management, an important skill that you will need to continue to use in the foreseeable future. Time management tends to be an umbrella term but entails dividing up your time to complete tasks based on the importance or due date of your commitments. Another important aspect of time management is avoiding procrastination; make sure when you set aside time to complete assignments, you are focused and use your time wisely. This way you won’t have to spend as much time working to complete each piece of work, and as a result, you will be more productive and have more free time. There are many different techniques you can use to help with your productivity and time management, some based on psychology or just simply logic. The Pomodoro Method is a popular technique used by people who often struggle to focus for long periods of time. This technique divides 30 minute sessions into 25 minutes of focusing on the task at hand followed by a 5 minute break. After repeating this process a few times, the breaks begin to get longer as a reward for your hard work. 

1. Ask For Help

Instead of spending hours on a task you don’t understand, asking for help from teachers or mentors can help decrease the amount of time spent on assignments and strengthen your understanding of the materials you are struggling with. At Harriton, make sure you utilize Lunch and Learn to visit teachers during their visiting times to get help with homework or assignments that you may need help with. Teachers are there to help students and Lunch and Learn allows you to work one on one with a teacher so they can focus more on your specific problem than they can when teaching a class. Getting help not only allows you to improve in new areas, but also allows you to be more productive when you are working independently on assignments outside of class. Other helpful resources at Harriton are the Writing Center and Learning Center in the library if you need help and aren’t available during lunch.

1. Get Plenty of Rest

One of the most under-appreciated habits to improve your mental health is getting enough sleep. Other than just making you feel energized for the day ahead, sleep has many other benefits such as reducing stress, decreasing how often you get sick, lower your risk for many chronic conditions, and improving your attention and memory. The CDC recommends that kids aged 12-17 years old should get at least 8-10 hours of sleep a night. With the rise of energy drinks being more easily available, kids rarely prioritize their sleep as much as they need to, not realizing that caffeine will never substitute for getting actual rest. With school starting later this year, make sure you take advantage of the new system, and get more than the recommended 8 hours. 

1. Spend Time with Family and Friends

Social activities are very important aspects of achieving balance when it comes to school, and can serve as a chance to relax and decompress after a long day or week. Spending time with family and friends also allows you to focus on things important to you that don’t revolve around sports, academics, or other extracurricular activities. As the saying goes, “laughter is the best medicine.” This definitely applies to having a social life as it can function as an outlet for stress, and gives kids the chance to have fun or do things they enjoy that aren’t academic. 

1. Take time for yourself

While maintaining a social life is important in separating yourself from school and extracurricular activities, taking time to prioritize time where you can just relax can also be beneficial. This can take very different forms, and can happen whenever. You can practice self care by putting on a face mask, or taking a hot bath, or something low effort like watching your comfort show or reading a new book. The internet has tons of ideas if you’re stumped, but whatever you do, this time you take should give you a chance to recharge mentally, physically, and emotionally. Taking time for yourself should be a reward for getting through a busy week and leave you feeling refreshed and ready to take on the next day or week.

1. Don’t be afraid to remove something from your schedule

If you are still overwhelmed even after practicing some of these tips and feel stressed out enough that it is damaging your mental health, you may need to sit with yourself and contemplate whether you have too much on your plate. If you have so much going on with academics, athletics, your job, and your extracurriculars that you don’t have time for anything fun or relaxing, you might need to reduce your workload. How you achieve this can look different for everyone but it may entail being less active in one club, decreasing working hours, or opting to take a study hall over a class you had scheduled. 

Having a proper school life balance is key to being successful in high school and life overall and helps prevent burnout and poor mental and physical health. Even with all the pressure put on high school kids, it’s important to remember that you are just a kid, and you shouldn’t sacrifice your childhood and mental health for a good resume when it’s possible to have both.