Welcome to our second post of 2021! As promised in the last post of last year to be more regular in posting the various topics in this blog, we are catering to our management enthusiasts who may be on campus, or learning in other ways. As analysed in our previous post, we have quite a sizeable portion of student readers, we also wanted to create a post more catered to professionals who may want to go back to school to increase knowledge too! I previously shared about why I decided to return to school, but this post will be more targetted at my thoughts on schooling while working, and also while I was working while schooling while on my internship at KavoKerr. Here are some of my thoughts:
Improving Time Management Skills
I have received various questions on how I manage to work and study at the same time for last year, while also running an active blog. How do I find all the time? One of the techniques which I used was to have more time management. Part and parcel of my learning journey was to create pockets of time reserved for various activities. This meant scheduling time on my calendar to complete my coursework, as well as internship or work activities without cannibalising either activities. It helped that there was a timetable at school and I planned my internship around my remaining modules. The true challenge for me this month is that now I’m entrusted with a major work project, and how I’m going to continue to deliver with excellence, I believe that time management will be key. Do read more about time management in this post.
Learning to Prioritise
Knowing that we have limited time, knowing how to set our priorities is crucial in ensuring that we get the most.
For my current priorities, I ranked them as work first, classes and preparation next, blog post third (but rest assured you’ll see the posts you expect to see!), exercise, hanging out with friends, catching more sleep if possible (please don’t reduce sleep priority for too long, usually I’m an advocate that you sleep for minimally 8 hours a day, but please do not go less than 6 hours, I tried it before and do not recommend it!
Knowing this is only a 4 months long arrangement with 1 month having to work weekends too, it is something which I could manage. But that being said, I strongly urge you to know when and what you should prioritise, to prevent burnout. (It’s not the best feeling to have, felt it when doing 7 CCAs in Year 1 at school but that’s a story for another day!)
Maximising Value and Efficiency
Something I learned about studying while working is that we can’t be too perfect at everything, as we have limited time. Gone are the days where we could do multiple revisions of the coursework that we want to submit, in order to try to get the perfect score at school.
This is one of the times when we can apply Pareto’s Principle where we use 20% of the time to complete 80% of the work. While completing my coursework to a deliverable standard, I can gain 80% of the knowledge with just 20% of the time, this meant that I would be able to learn enough about what I am learning at school, without compromising on my work responsibilities.
Well that’s all for today’s reflection. If you’re considering to work while studying to gain more experience or study while working to gain more knowledge, I would urge you to consider your time, priorities and how you can maximise your efficiency, in order to achieve the best of both worlds!
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Image Credits: Original Image created by Tan Wei Xiang, using image by Wengang Zhai on Unsplash
If you’re still in school, here’s a post for you to make the most out of your business school experience.
If you are interested in pursuing the Mini Masters in Marketing Management, do check this post out on course reviews.