Balancing academic responsibilities and fulfilling social life is a challenge for any student, but for neurodivergent learners, this task can feel overwhelming.
This is especially true for those with executive functioning challenges, who may encounter additional difficulties organizing, managing time commitments, and maintaining a healthy routine.
Finding harmony between schoolwork and social life often requires unique strategies and support.
This guide will offer practical approaches to help learners navigate these demands while honoring individual strengths and challenges.
The Importance of Balancing School & Life
Creating work-life balance is crucial for mental and physical health. While many studies focus on work-life balance in adults specifically, it’s clear that achieving a balance between school and social life is just as vital for our teen’s well-being.
Well-Being
Feeling happy and successful in school requires students to establish and maintain a healthy balance between work and play, much like adults do. Just as adults can experience burnout in the workplace, students are susceptible to the same effects of being stressed and overwhelmed. Students must learn the importance of healthy balance early on as this will lay the foundation for other healthy work habits and boundaries. When high demands and stress take over our time for personal likes and interests, our physical and mental health will suffer as a result.
Confidence in Future Plans
Pearson’s Connections Academy found that students who achieve a healthy school-life balance report having a better understanding of their goals and interests after school. On the other hand, students who reported negative school-life balance also reported missing out on self-exploration and making connections with others their age. Students also reported difficulty with career planning and preparation, at the expense of school demands. This can create additional stress and hardship as students attempt to manage their workload while they worry about future plans and endeavors.
Essential Executive Function Skills for Finding Balance
Executive functioning skills are crucial for school-life balance because these skills help manage time, plan tasks, and set priorities, ensuring academic responsibilities are met without sacrificing personal and social well-being.
Planning/Prioritization
Planning involves identifying and managing future tasks and is essential for balancing academic and social life. Effectively managing time and energy across different areas of life requires strong planning skills. Without this skill, a learner may struggle to prioritize studying for tests and completing assignments on time and may instead prioritize social activities at the expense of academic success.
Time Management
Developing time management skills is key to balancing academic and social life. This skill involves estimating how long it takes to complete a task, as well as budgeting that time effectively to complete tasks efficiently. This prevents last-minute stress and allows space in your schedule for social activities.
Organization
Organization refers to how we arrange our environment to create order and structure for the items and activities around us. The more organized you are, the quicker you can complete tasks with fewer errors. Good organization also supports time management, as it reduces time wasted searching for items or materials needed to complete schoolwork.
Without these skills, it becomes difficult to stay organized, meet deadlines, and make room for relaxation and social interactions, leading to overwhelm and burnout. Below are a number of effective strategies for supporting executive functioning across these areas.
5 Tips for Creating School-Life Balance
Below are a handful of strategies that can help you manage school responsibilities while still making time for relaxation, social connectedness, and personal well-being.
1. Create a Structured Schedule
A structured schedule helps with school-life balance by providing a clear framework for managing time, ensuring that both academic and personal activities are accounted for. You can use a schedule to allocate specific time blocks for studying, assignments, and socializing. This reduces the risk of procrastinating or overcommitting. With a set routine, it becomes easier to track deadlines while also making room for self-care and social connections.
2. Create Prioritized To-Do Lists
To-do lists are useful but can be hard to implement effectively when not tailored to your specific needs. Incorporating a to-do list into your school routine can help you manage time more efficiently and stay on top of your responsibilities. You can customize your to-do list by going digital, sorting and prioritizing, creating separate lists, breaking projects down into manageable steps, or using an Eisenhower Matrix.
3. Eisenhower Matrix
An Eisenhower Matrix can be used to help you identify urgent tasks that need immediate attention while scheduling less urgent tasks (but still important) tasks for a later time. This strategy is helpful because it visually depicts your tasks and guides you through a process to prioritize those that are urgent and important and those that are not. After prioritizing your tasks, you can fill the remaining available time with social activities and relaxation.
4. Break Tasks into Smaller Steps
Breaking down large tasks into smaller, more manageable steps reduces overwhelm. This also makes it easier to schedule school commitments. This can be done with large projects, papers, or multi-step assignments. For example, you could divide papers into sessions such as brainstorming, outline development, and writing each section into their own times on your calendar.
5. Practice Self-Care
Up until this point, I’ve written about ways to balance academics and social life. It’s equally as important to make sure you are scheduling time for yourself. Engaging in self-care throughout the week prevents burnout and promotes feeling refreshed. Self-care takes many different forms, from taking care of your physical health to disengaging from daily pressures. Prioritizing self-care ensures you stay recharged and ready to meet academic and social demands.
Practical Tips and Common Mistakes
Establishing a balance between school and other areas of life is a learning process, and making mistakes along the way is normal. It’s common to overcommit in some areas while neglecting personal needs in others. Below are some additional considerations when looking to establish balance.
Establish Boundaries
As you begin to establish a schedule and priorities, it will be important to establish boundaries with those around you. Friends and family will not have the same insight into your schedule as you do, so it’s essential to communicate when you are busy versus when you are free to socialize. Limits can be set by clearly defining when and how much time is designated to academics versus personal activities. This will help different responsibilities from infringing on the other, causing stress and frustration.
Balance is a Journey, Not a Destination
Balance between school and life responsibilities is a continuous process that evolves with changing responsibilities and personal needs. Academic demands will change, as will our personal preferences. Maintaining balance will require regular reassessment and adjustment. It’s normal to feel off-track at times, as balance is not static. Remember to be open to evaluating and adjusting as your priorities and needs evolve.
Assistance Might Be Needed
In order to independently establish school-life balance, it’s assumed that students have the tools and resources to move forward. Learners do not always have the same control and autonomy to create a balance between their school and personal lives, as adults do. Learners who are involved in many activities outside of school or have additional family or home commitments may face additional barriers when trying to balance out all their responsibilities. Students may need support with different strategies and tools to help with executive functioning skills, like those mentioned above.
Additional Resources and Tools
Tools for Personal Use
We have a couple of resources to help empower you when developing executive functioning skills. First, use our free Executive Function Assessment to identify areas that you may need support developing. For example, you might find out that organization is an area to improve based on your self-reported ratings.
Next, navigate to the Executive Function Resource Hub. This site contains a collection of different tools and strategies organized by area of executive function. After taking the assessment, you can find different techniques to help with organization skills.
Direct Support & Coaching
Executive function coaching can be a valuable tool in helping learners balance their academic and social lives. EF coaching is a method that teaches essential skills like time management, organization, and prioritization, necessary for learning how to navigate different life demands. Through strategies like creating organization systems, breaking tasks into smaller steps, and setting realistic goals, students learn to effectively plan their studying time while also carving out space for social activities and self-care.
TL;DR – (Too Long; Didn’t Read)
Balancing academic and social life is challenging, especially for neurodivergent learners who experience executive functioning (EF) challenges. EF skills like time management, organization, and planning are essential for managing schoolwork without sacrificing personal well-being.
Strategies such as creating structured schedules, prioritizing tasks, breaking projects into manageable steps, and engaging in self-care are key to achieving balance. Mistakes are part of the process, and setting boundaries is crucial to maintaining harmony between school and personal commitments. You will have to continually check in with yourself on ways to improve your academic and social balance since it is a constantly changing process. Some free resources are available to help assist you in the process. Alternatively, executive function coaching can provide the tools needed to navigate these demands effectively.
Further Reading
- Life Skills Advocate (2023) – 16 Tips to Customize a To-Do List for Any Learner
- Life Skills Advocate (2020) – How To Use The Eisenhower Matrix To Help Your Teen Plan Their Day
- Life Skills Advocate (2020) – Executive Functioning Skills 101: The Basics of Planning
- Life Skills Advocate (2020) – Executive Functioning Skills 101: The Basics of Time Management
- Life Skills Advocate (2020) – Executive Functioning Skills 101: All About Organization
- Connections Academy by Pearson (2024) – New Connections Academy Report Shows Positive School-Life Balance Sets Students Up for Success
- Harvard Business Review (2021) – Work-Life Balance is a Cycle, Not an Achievement
- Perna (2024) – Better Mental Health For Kids Starts With Good School-Life Balance