Not everyone knows this about me yet, but I’ve switched careers. I’ve worked in a dental office for over a year now, and in April I wrote my admissions exam and received conditional acceptance into dental hygiene school. For the last four months, I’ve been completing my pre-requisites and continuing to work full-time. Once I thought running a business straight out of university was the hardest thing I’d done. I was wrong.

I start my next round of courses in two weeks and I feel confident going forward, knowing what I’m capable of, but not excessively hubristic. You see, less than a month into it I was having my doubts. I was pushing myself harder and harder to reach a goal that looked so far off (three months can be a long time when you’re burning the candle at both ends). Something has to give when you’re working full-time and studying, but it doesn’t have to be your sanity. This is how I got through it.

Stay. On. Task. I can’t !@#$%^& stress this enough.

The key to staying focussed, in my experience, is to transition fluidly from one activity to the next. Often I’d come home at the end of a long day feeling dead tired. But picking up my phone for a quick social media break would be to my detriment. It didn’t take me long to figure out that a ten minute break soon becomes half an hour, then an hour. The easiest way to avoid falling into the vicious spiral of being too tired to do anything is to hit the books immediately after coming home from work. I’d take a break half an hour later for dinner, but the small act of starting my next task made it easier to return to it than finding the motivation to start at all.

Plan ahead but be realistic with your expectations.

Having a rigorous schedule worked wonders for me. It’s like meal planning for the week ahead! We’ve all been there before. You tell yourself you’ll cook gourmet meals every night of the week, but by Tuesday you’ve run out of fucks to give. However, if all of your ingredients are already cut up and laid out, and you read the recipe the night before, it makes the task so much easier. Plan for the week on Sunday, and only plan one week at a time. That way, it won’t feel like you’re parcelling the rest of your life away and you’ll have a better idea of how much you can realistically accomplish in an evening. I also recommend getting a desktop calendar to keep track of milestones.

Furthermore, maintaining some sense of normalcy week-to-week will make managing both aspects of your life feel more do-able. For me, Thursdays were for putting the finishing touches on assignments and Fridays were for chemistry experiments. Back to that thing we said about running out of fucks to give—come Friday no one feels like cooking, so it’s every man for himself in my home. That usually resulted in me having the kitchen to myself to complete my labs. Trust me, if you’re going to play with sulphuric acid at home (don’t do it, kids), better to do it in the sink.

Reduce stress in other areas of your life wherever you can.

This goes without saying, but you have got to reduce your load in other areas of your life. Unfortunately I couldn’t decrease my load at work, so I had to find other ways to take care of my mental health. I’d be in the office at 8 and home by 6, at which point I’d study until 11. My trade off? Saturdays were for me. It didn’t matter if I had to stay up until the witching hour to finish lab reports on Friday night, nothing could interfere with the sanctity of my Saturday. Cooking dinner with my boyfriend, sleeping in or going out for the odd coffee date with my girlfriend were my saving grace.

Unfortunately you’re going to have to give something up, just for a short while. I packed away my paints and promised I’d return to them over the holidays. Painting, for me, is very soothing, and you’re going to need a soothing activity. But you also need something that isn’t going to consume you, which is why you learn to appreciate little things like that first cup of coffee in the morning, snuggles with your fluffy throw pillow (did I say that? I meant cat), and finishing an assignment early enough to read a chapter of a book before bed.

Finally, stop being so hard on yourself.

It soon became apparent that I was regularly punishing myself with my schedule. You’ve got to learn to work smarter, not harder, and permit yourself the little things that lift your spirits. I lost sight of that, which is why I’ve come up with something like a battle plan with which to approach my next semester. For one thing, I’ll never tackle organic chemistry while I have other ongoing courses again. I’m going to stagger the start of my courses (yes, I can do that) and I’m going to be completely unapologetic about leaving work on time. I don’t know how I would have managed this semester without a few key people. I sincerely hope you’ve got a supportive circle of friends like mine who understand why you take so long to text them back!

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