One of the most common things I hear from alumni is how much easier it is to have a work-life balance once you start working full time. The reasoning is quite clear; as a student, you always have assignments, projects, studying, reading, etc. to do. When you get home, you still have those responsibilities. So, you still feel like you could be doing work.

Having spent a summer working full time as an intern, it was indeed easier to make the distinction between work and home life. I would go to work in the morning, do my work, go to meetings, eat my meals, and go back home. At home, I could relax and lounge around, maybe get dinner with friends, play video games, etc. without feeling guilty about it. I could leave projects at work unfinished, and although I thought about them, they didn’t distract me from life. It was a pretty good time.

As a student, for basically all of my life so far, I didn’t realize the importance of this. My room was where I spent a majority of my time, whether I was doing work or not. I would pull all-nighters to finish essays in the same place I would stay up late playing video games. I would sleep in the same place I read my textbooks and took notes. None of this really concerned me. I always thought studying was a pain. I always thought it was hard to go to sleep. This was the case for basically all of my high school and college career.

It’s not like I still don’t have trouble sleeping and staying disciplined while studying. But I’ve picked up some tricks that have been suprisingly effective.

I don’t work in my apartment anymore. This advice was given to me by a number of people (my dad, my roommate Deep, my math professor), but I always took it for granted. It wasn’t until this past summer that I really took it to heart. It was the clear seperation of spaces for work and for leisure that has been effective in keeping me focusing when I am outside. I am very lucky because I live very close to Soda hall, home to a number of undergraduate lounges such as the CSUA office or the Upper Division lounge. Berkeley also has a number of libraries and student spaces around campus, so between classes I can just stay on campus and study and work.

This strategy isn’t an end-all solution, however. I struggle with finding enough time for myself to relax because I tend not to come home until fairly late. I don’t entertain myself much during the day when I’m out and about. Although I would say that’s a consequence of my heavy workload this semester. In addition, getting out of bed in the morning when I don’t have something mandatory can be difficult. The motivation to go out and work is limited for me, on top of going to sleep too late. I need my 8 hours!

Part of this strategy is being able to do my work remotely. I can usually guarantee that I’ll have WiFi access, so I set up remote desktop for my home PC and ssh (mosh) access to my home server. This solved the problems I faced of working on my various programming assignments that were only set up on my home machines. My tendency to work away from home has gotten so strong that I will walk about 30 seconds away to Soda just to remote desktop back in to do work!

Not as related to work-life balance, but some advice I got for sleeping was to 1) not take naps after 3:00 PM and not take naps longer than 30 minutes, 2) to only use my bed for sleeping, 3) not to eat or use electronics before going to bed, 4) wake up at a regular time, 5) go to sleep on time. These points are great advice, but I still struggle to do all of these. Trust me, I’ve tried a lot of things to enforce these but I always manage to break them myself. I think it really comes down to discipline. Personally, my parents have told me to go to sleep a vast majority of my nights. My guess is that my parents’ command has been really ingrained in me as the signal to sleep. But then I stopped listening to them and kept staying up. Now, I tend to have trouble going to sleep at night. Sometimes I think about this comment I found on /g/.

this is a friendly reminder that all sources of abundant, simple, irrelevant information are terrible for your brain and are ruining you. 4chan, reddit, facebook, etc. are creating a high stress, high conflict environment where you gain nothing but knowledge of dank memes and the opinions of the most retarded people on the planet coupled with backlash from even more retarded people. sjw’s hardly exist outside of the internet and neither do /pol/acks. close all 500 of your tabs. you know that half of those threads are in archive now anyway. go read a book, eat some vegetables, and pick up a hobby that doesn’t involve shitposting.

let the retards have the internet. we can escape to the real world.

I hope I figure out a solution to this sooner rather than later.

Work-life balance and time management is something that I would like to think can be learned. In the end, my solution to getting things done and staying happy and healthy will be my own. I sometimes think of this as an optimization problem. Maximize productivity while staying within some bounds of sleep, health, sanity, relationships, etc. Thanks for reading :)