Balancing a Full-Time Job and Consistent Study: My Secret

I have two years of getting used to always waking up late. Anticipating waking up every morning, cutting my work hours short and watching it through until signing off in the evening.

Repeat this for the next morning.

I'd always get up late for work, in my now past two years.

Every single morning seemed to be the same — start my early shift, do the job, and count hours until I can sign off. In the evening, I play games.

The next day, that cycle begins again.

These days, I play a lot of video games, and waking up early to study or write has become another everyday activity before the 9-5. It changed my behavior, which ended me with a new job and a 40% raise, moving into my own apartment instead of living with some roommate strangers. Life certainly did not get easier; it got busier, but in the most wonderful way for me.

Just as an analogy, I will be comparing video games with the way I consistently study because that makes it enjoyable for me to study.

I hope it will be of benefit to you as well.

Selecting a Goal

Complete missions or quests in any popular video game, level it up, and do not forget about side quests.

The completion of these makes us progress and opens up new skills for us. Mostly, this does a lot to help ease us through the game. Main quests are like our goals; sidequests serve as the milestones one would pass on a journey. Side quests complete reward us with new skills and perks.

They're just supposed to provide us as well as take us from or give us another hit of dopamine engagement.

Last year I had set a goal to become a cloud engineer. The only process that would yield the required result was learning new skills as well as carrying out projects that are cloud engineer related. The sub goals were the phases of the project, like learning programming, APIs, and databases among them. It was always the case that before unlocking a new skill, something was learned and applied.

What'll your goals be?

Getting Triggered

Failing or dying in that addicting game we're playing can be gut-wrenching.

It can also make us want to quit. But then again, we're always thinking, Trying again. Because we can definitely do better, After all, it isn't just the motivation that keeps us going but rather the harsh treatment the game gives us. We have not been getting used to losing.

So we try and try again until we finally get it right.

Living with five strangers kept me in a permanent state of trigger.

I didn't want to schedule my cooking time, being that there was usually a crowd in the kitchen. Or check if the living room was empty enough for me to be alone with my date. Every time I think about how much I had to work to afford an apartment, it pushed my buttons. Reminders that I should go study to earn more money and eventually leave.

Escape the Noise

Before embarking upon the new habits, I had shifted to a new town.

I didn't know anyone. It gave me time to think about what was to come in the future. Some may consider it lonely, but I saw an opportunity to make things happen without distractions. Being alone so much, boredom crept in. It becomes my power.

The things I do during rituals have changed. Instead of late-night gaming, I now get to bed early to study and hit the gym before my work shift starts.

Shifting Your Perspective

Studying becomes difficult because of a full-time job.

At the end of a workday like this, one will slump onto the couch, power up a favorite social media app, and seek to escape from the needs of life. One knows that the habit will not serve more in reaching a goal, but a long day merits the time to unwind.

No amount of self-help advice can cure such mindsets. This is where we need to make a daily decision where we get up, sit in that chair, and study.

But there are things we can do to develop more discipline in ourselves.

Using a time-blocking app to develop the habit of study - time-blocking my whole morning: wake up at 6 AM, shower for 15 minutes, brush for 5... etc., into this I was to fit in a 45-60 minute study session at some point. Recently, I also started working with James Clear's Atomic Habits app to work towards my goal of writing online.

Measure Your Progress

As I was tracing my steps through the years, I also enlightened myself that I was indeed leveling up.

It was a way of fighting on days

• That left me deflated.
• That made me feel like I wasn't moving forward.
• That made me feel like everything I was learning was leaving my mind at a faster rate than it entered.

In video games, our progress is seen in those much-coveted skill points and unlocked perks. I felt finding a similar way to measure my progress in my academic life would work just as well.

That was my visual reminder of how far I was from achieving my goal because it remembers me to improve and decreases the chances of giving up.

I used Notion to keep track of all the new skills learned in preparation for becoming a cloud engineer. Every new learning was matched against the 'requirements' and 'nice to have' part of the descriptions of jobs I could find until I virtually ticked off what I needed.

Final Comments

With the main activity involving the bulk of my time being a full-time job, gamification is one of those things that helps me learn continuously new things. Goal tracking, measuring progress, as well as time blocking has made the whole thing much easier.

Figuring out our goals is never that easy. Sometimes we just have to sit for a while with our thoughts in order to figure out what we really want. But once we do know what our goal is, developing those positive habits makes it that much easier to realize your desired outcome.