How to Deal When There's Too Much On Your Plate

By Kaitlin Hurtado on February 24, 2020

College is a hectic time for anyone. Whether it’s the stress of keeping up with weekly readings and assignments, to attending all shifts at your part-time job or internship to help keep yourself afloat. Not to mention, trying to make time for your personal life – calls to your family back home, going out with your friends. It can be overwhelming at times when you realize just how much you have stacked on your plate and no idea how you are going to end up getting through it. Instead of throwing in the towel and resigning yourself into getting run into the ground and burnt out, try looking at it from a different perspective. If you focus all your energy on how you think there’s no possible way for you to get through it, it is going to be much harder to think about your situation rationally and come up with the solution best for you. Instead, try focusing on what you can do to help yourself to get through it.

If you need help getting started, here are a few pointers on how to deal when there’s too much on your plate.

Photo: pexels

Break down your workload 

Anyone would be overwhelmed with a 20-step obstacle course in between them and their goal. That’s at least 20 steps to go through, and 20 ways you can fail before you even reach where you want to be. It’s easy to adopt this mindset, but it’s also the mindset that will discourage you from taking any action. If you see a pile of work ahead of you, it’s all too easy to step back and rest, either in fear or laziness. Try breaking down your workload into categories or steps.

For example, a typical college student’s schedule revolves around school, work, extracurriculars, and personal time. Those four things all have smaller tasks within them: lectures, homework, studying, shifts, commuting, club meetings, club events, dates, hanging out, gym time, and so on. Recognizing these different activities isn’t to overwhelm, but to help college students recognize their different tasks. They may be thinking school is taking up too much time, but it may just be that their “studying” is taking up hours and not all that effective. Or, they may realize that they are spending way too much time with friends when they should be stepping back and picking up more hours at work or studying.

An easy way to check how much time you are spending on any given activity is to spend a couple of days tracking your time through a time journal. Check-in every hour on a piece of paper (or the notes app on your phone) to log how you are spending your time. This can reveal hidden time-wasters, such as spending two hours every meal – eating, laying down, watching YouTube videos – when you can add an extra hour somewhere else in your schedule.

Figure out what’s avoidable, and what’s not

Now that you’ve seen all you do and what’s causing you stress, it’s time to figure out what you actually need to do and what’s “unnecessary.” This doesn’t mean completely shutting out an activity for the sake of saving time, but realizing that your time is valuable and spreading yourself thin is cheating yourself from appreciating what you do on a daily basis. For example, many college students run into the problem of joining too many extracurriculars and spending all their time attending them instead of giving time to other areas of their lives. While it’s great to be well-rounded, it isn’t worth it to feel constantly overwhelmed and then feeling like you aren’t enjoying what you are doing.

Consider dropping one extracurricular, or cutting back on hours at your work if you can afford to. It doesn’t have to be a permanent change, but just try making these small changes to your schedule and see how it affects how you are dealing with your workload.

Give yourself time to figure it out

Practice makes perfect, and the same should be said about figuring out how to make your own schedule and what works best for you. With so many variables in how your daily life goes, it’s going to be pretty hard to figure out things on your first try. Don’t be disheartened when you still feel stressed – it’s inevitable. However, you need to be aware of how different activities and tasks are affecting you to change your schedule in the future. Be ready to shift around your schedule to find the right fit for you: drop a club, study during your commute to take advantage of “lost time,” have your friends over for a study session to combine hanging out and studying.

There’s no way to perfectly plan out your life — things happen when we least expect it. The best thing you can do is help yourself tackle your workload with the right mindset.

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