Personal life and school are difficult to balance. Sometimes it feels like we have to sacrifice one to succeed in the other. The more homework we do, the less time we have for friends. And if we don’t balance them, we end up cutting into a completely different part of our life—our sleep schedules.

It has happened to all of us more than once.  We procrastinate, or we go out with friends. We put fun first, and then when we get home, we remember that we have homework due tomorrow. Then we have to make a choice: sleep or a good grade? A lot of the time we choose the grade.

It seems simple at the time. It’s easy to just take a nap when you get home, but then you may fall behind on even more homework. Or worse—the sleep deprivation catches up to you sometime around math class.

There’s no easy fix to this problem. We can point fingers at whoever decided that we should be in school by 7:40. We can point fingers at the school system in general. We can even point fingers at ourselves and our less than optimal time management skills. But none of those options are satisfying. Pointing fingers won’t get us anywhere; the only thing that will help is addressing the issue.