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How to balance Penn Foster studies with work and family demands The biggest challenge for many of us is how to balance our studies, work and family demands. While we want happy fulfilling lives outside of family, work and school, we have to make personal sacrifices in order to be successful in life. Since time is precious, keeping a balance between three worlds can be a challenge. Fortunately, with proper planning, balance is possible. Every day, I have to make choices and manage my time incredibly well in order to be able to balance my online studies, my work and family demands.
In my opinion family demands, work and studies balance are a process, not a static achievement. So, it is important to make the decisions selecting careers and jobs, timing children, allocating roles and responsibilities etc, that will provide the opportunity for balance. The real task of balance takes place on a weekly and daily basis, even from hour to hour . While going to Penn Foster College online to get my associates in Health Information Technology degree, I also have a family to take care of everyday.
I always put my family first upon other things, and try to be a good mother to a beautiful one year old baby boy and a good partner to a loving husband. I am a part time employee at a family restaurant. While this takes time away from everything I do, my husband and I saw it as a necessary measure to help ease of the financial burden we have, between the house, cars and student loans. We are very fortunate to be able to reduce our babysitting costs because both my husband and I have family and close friends in town, all of whom are happy to spend time with our baby boy.
To help me balance and organize my studies, work and family demands, I bought a daily planner. The daily planner comes in very handy and I would recommend it for everyone to use it. It is very practical, its small so you carry it everywhere you go. It helps you organize your daily life, write down assignments that need to be done in a certain time, it keeps you updated on the work schedule, it also helps to remember a meeting at work or with friends, doctor appointments, birthdays, parties etc.
We are all very busy with work and school so sometimes we forget what needs to be done in time, so the daily planner is a very useful tool that helps you remember important events. Every day I update something new on my planner that would keep me updated for the upcoming week or month. For example, when it comes to my studies I have a special section for it and I always put a writing “study an hour in am and pm for English” to look over the materials on the given chapter. It is a great way not to fall behind on your studies and you are much better prepared when it comes on taking the chapter exam.
When it comes to work I put the days and hours that I work a head of time so I can be able to figure out the time I have left to spend with my family and time for studying. As I mention before, family time is very important to me so I mostly put on my planer simple family stuff such us having dinner in a certain time, days of going out, or doing different chores, enrolling my son into daily or weekly activities, shopping, or family trips. I actually love the idea of doing my Penn Foster degree online , because it allows you to study at your own time and pace.
Online classes fit your schedule in any time throughout 24 hours of a given day. If help is needed there are just a phone call away helping you in every step of the process. I attended college classes on campus for a couple of months before enrolling into Penn Foster and I couldn’t keep up with all the work. The classes were in different days and different hours and sometimes we had to wait after class to talk with the professors, so it didn’t work out for me. I couldn’t balance the time with studies, work and family, it was overwhelming for me.
Attending college classes in campus can be challenging specially for young parents, because after having a long day and being tired with taking care of the baby and housework, there are times that you don’t even want to go to class. It also saves money not to spend on gas or books. Instead of taking your studies online at your own time would be so much better, to concentrate on your studies, work and spending more family time. Balancing the time to spend with your family can also be hard.
I plan and also try to have dinners as much as I can with my husband and son but sometimes our work schedule is not the same and we can’t make it to dinner at the same time. That is perfectly alright, things like this happen sometimes. When it comes on going out and having a good time with my family I picked out a day of the week and told my self that on Sunday there is not going to be any studying or work. I plan to study a day ahead so I can have time off with my family and enjoy it. I’m very happy I do that because just by thinking of having a day off you feel good and feeling like you just left behind the stress of the past week.
Compartmentalizing is something I do constantly. Figuring out how long to spend doing each thing is a task itself. If I don’t do that correctly, my neglect of any of these obligations will have a negative impact on my family , work and my studies. Right now, I have so many things happening in my life, all at the same time. Without a doubt, I must portion out my time in an efficient manner, because if I don’t, I cannot excel at any of these tasks. There are sacrifices, but with organization skills and balance you will succeed.