Going Back to School for an MBA? Here Are 7 Tips to Help You Maintain a Good Work/School/Life Balance

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Going back to school when you are working and managing your family life can be a real challenge. Whether you go back to school for a master of business administration degree or some other masters degree, you will have to work to maintain a good balance between your school work, your work work and your home life. It is possible to complete your master of business administration without blowing up the rest of your life.

  1. Look at your job. Think about getting a job that does not have a lot of travel. Reevaluate your work situation if you find you are on the road 25% of the time or more. This can make the balancing act between your adult education program, your work and your family a whole lot harder to manage. If you cannot make that work with the job you have when you start your return to school, you may want to look at other opportunities. Talk to your employer, you will be a lot more valuable to your firm, many of the times, when you have a master of business administration than without it.
  2. Think about your family. Are you planning to have a child? If you want to have children, and planning is not aways an option, you may want to put that off while you are finishing your master business administration degree. It can be hard to be pregnant while working and going to school and it can be hard to have a spouse who is pregnant during all of that. Remember, you are human and there are only 24 hours in a day.
  3. Do not cut back on your sleep. When you are going back to school, this is one of the best tips you can heed and best things you can do for everyone. If you are going back to school for a masters of business administration, a communications degree or anything else, one of the areas you will want to shortchange is the amount of sleep you get. You have work responsibilities, school responsibilities and family responsibilities. It is all too easy to skip some sleep. This is a mistake. You will shortchange everyone when you do not get enough sleep. This can also lead to you getting sick and then nothing will get done.
  4. Be present. It is easy to be someplace else a lot when you are working on your school and work and family life. When you are at your classes, you may worry about your work,. When you are at work, you may worry about your family. When you are with your family, you may worry about school. You will not do anything well when you are not doing it 100%. Make it a point to focus your energies on what you are doing when you are doing it. You will get more out of everything when you do this.
  5. Give yourself a break. Your brain needs time off every week. You need to set aside time for the important people in your life and you need to set aside some time for yourself. Make sure you set this time aside and then actually do it. You will see a big difference when you do this in how you feel.
  6. Get your exercise. Many people who have completed a masters of business administration program while working have said working out helped. This will help you have more energy and stamina and you will need both as you juggle everything in your life.
  7. Be realistic. You may think it is a good idea to get a lot of credit hours in right away or to take the hardest classes together but you are human. Make it a point to balance the credit hours you take and the difficulty of the coursework. You do not want to burn yourself out. That will just make the process more, not less, painful for everyone involved.

Going back to school for a master of business administration degree can be painful or it can be rewarding. You can achieve a good work/life/school balance if you work at the process.

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