1 productivity method to help you perfectly balance schoolwork & extracurriculars

Efficient time management is key to excelling academically and building a stand-out project.

We spoke with Sandy Nguyen, one of our mentors who now studies at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, to learn how she balanced top grades with leading her viral autism awareness campaign, Different But Not Less.

She founded the project in high school where she which garnered 20 million views on TikTok in Vietnam and had top models, celebrities, and citizens around the nation participating in her dance challenge. (You can read more about her project in this newspaper headline.)

Sandy’s challenge:

In order to scale her project, she had to become fluent in Vietnamese. Sandy is ethnically Vietnamese, but had lost her proficiency after living abroad from G4-G10.

Her goal was to become fluent as quick as possible.

What she had to balance:

• Dedicating 5-10 hours a week to practice Vietnamese

• Studying and acing her exams (school & SATs)

• Leading her team to create new media for her campaign.

Sandy’s productivity secret? The 80-20 rule.

What is the 80-20 rule?

The 80-20 rule comes from a business management idea which states that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes. The idea is that you don’t need to put in a lot of energy to have sufficient results.

Applied to balancing commitments, this can mean putting 20% of your energy into 4 key priorities. For Sandy, this would have been:

The 80-20 rule allows you to better visualize your time & set boundaries so you don’t burn out. (For example, accidentally spending all of your energy on pure academics can result in you losing energy/time to work on a sufficient project.)

You can read more about the 80-20 principle here.

Another useful method: time blocking.

Time blocking goes hand in hand with the 80-20 rule.

Referring back to Sandy’s four priorities above, her time-blocked schedule could look like this:

You don’t have to stick to your time-blocked schedule all the time, but your goal is to have that allocated time - for example, two hours of Vietnamese studying - consistently on Tuesdays & Thursdays.

List your four priorities & make your own time blocked schedule!

Here are some popular resources you can use to get started on your own schedule:

• Align Day Time Blocking Template

• Smartsheet’s Task Tracker & Time Blocking Template

• More on the 80-20 rule (by Asana)

• More on time blocking (by todoist)

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