How Do You Balance Your Language Learning With Work And Other Commitments To Avoid Burn Out?

Living life can be tough, we have to dedicate a lot of time to our work and other commitments and somehow still find the time to do what we want and chase our interests.

For some hobbies this isn’t too much of a problem, but for language learning, it can be. Learning a language can take a lot of time and effort and trying to squeeze this into a busy life is difficult. In an ideal world we could all just take a few weeks, or even months off and just focus on the language all day long, but that isn’t possible for most of us …so we need to find a balance.

Balancing your studies with the rest of your life is extremely important and if you get this right you will avoid burn out and more importantly, make progress with your language.

Set Your Priorities

The first way you can balance your studies with the rest of your life is to sit down and work out exactly what all your commitments are and then decide what ones you feel are most important, then set these as your priority.

Once you know what your priorities are in life, you can work out how much time and effort needs to go into each of these.

You need to be realistic and honest with yourself when you do this. Language learning may not actually be your main priority, even if you really want it to be …and if that is the case then you need to accept that and perhaps you will have to study less than you want to and focus on the other things that you actually need to prioritise.

This is going to help you balance things out across your life and then you should hopefully be less likely to overdo things and burn out.

You also have to remember that this can always be changing, so it can be sensible to come back to this every few months and re-evaluate things and see if any of your priorities have changed.   

Set Goals

Once you know what your priorities are, you can use these to set goals. You know what is most important to you and you know what you can spend your time on, hopefully language learning is high on the list, but even if it isn’t, you can still make goals.

You need to know your priorities before setting your goals, as it really make a difference to what you will be aiming for.

If we imagine that my language learning is a really low priority and maybe I can squeeze in 30 minutes a day. Now let’s imagine that for you, it is an extremely high priority and you are going to make it your sole focus and you are going to dedicate all day to it and spend a solid 10 hours a day studying your language.

If this was the situation we would be setting very different goals. You are probably going to be aiming very high and wanting to see a lot of progress quickly and actually reaching fluency, where as I might just be happy getting comfortable with the basics.

However, we could actually set the same goals, maybe we both want to learn 1000 words, or we both want to reach a B1 level. The only difference here would be the time that it takes to reach these goals. If you are prioritising your language, you will reach these far faster than me.    

Make A Plan So You Have A Balanced Routine

Now that you have your priorities and goals set, then you can move on to making your study plan.

This becomes a lot easier when you have your goals set, as basically you can work backwards from here. You know what you want to achieve and the plan will be your step by step guide on how to get there. You also know your priorities, so you know how long you can spend on this every day, which is going to make sure the plan you make actually fits into your life in a balanced way.

You can then come up with a plan that is going to break the goal down into this daily time slot.

If we take the goal of “learning the core 1000 words” of the language, the plan will be how we get there. You can’t learn all 1000 words in one day, so you have to break it down into daily chunks …but then how many can you learn?  …well this is why we set out priorities, we can use this to work how much effort we can put towards this everyday and go from there. This should help us not over do things. We can plan realistically, which will help us to not get burnt out.

If we go back to how I said it may be a low priority for me, and I might only have 30 minutes a day for language learning, then I may only plan to learn only 3 new words a day. I will just stick with that and get their eventually. It going to take a while, but this is what happens when you make things a low priority, but the important thing is that my life should hopefully be balanced and I shouldn’t burn out.

However, as you where able to make studying a high priority, and you had 10 hours a day to study, you might plan to learn more words a day. Either way your life will still be balanced you know you can put more effort into this without it effecting your other commitments, so while you are working much harder on your language compared to me, you should still hopefully avoid burn out as well.

(You can read more about – How Common Is Language Learning Burnout?)

Be Willing To Go Slow With Your Language Studies

Sometimes to keep your life balanced, you need to be willing to make sacrifices, which could mean you need to slow your studies down like I have already mentioned in the above examples.

I know I have had to do this in real life and while it kills me, it is the best thing to do as it will help reduce the chances of burn out.

If you have a particularly busy life then you may need to just put less effort into your studies until you can free up more time. Trying to keep studying at full power while also dealing with other things is going to drain you very quickly and you will find you are burnt out in no time. I know it’s not what you want, but sometimes that is what you have to do to balance things out.

Hopefully you can change things and start to tilt the balance in the other direction and sacrifice more from your working life, to free up more time and energy that can go into your language studies.

Be Kind To Yourself

Trying to balance your work with other areas of your life as well as your language learning can be tough and one of the best things you can do is just be kind to yourself.

It is easy to beat yourself up if you do not study hard enough or make enough progress in your language, but you need to be kind to yourself. There are only so many hours in the day and if you already have a lot of other important things to do then you can’t always do everything you want to.

You just have to be happy with what you can do, even if you feel that it isn’t enough. Things can change and you may be able to commit more effort in the future and even if you can’t, your small steps today will all add and you will still make progress in the language.

Try And Merge Your Commitments With Your Language Studies

If you are having trouble finding balance between your commitments and your language studies, then you could maybe try and merge the two.

I know this will not be possible for a lot of people, but you should try and think outside of the box. You need to look at your commitments and ask yourself “is there any way I can involve my new language” for the vast majority of things, you probably can’t. Your boss isn’t going to be too happy if you start speaking to customers in Spanish, but there still may be some things you can do.

Perhaps you can listen to your language while doing one of your commitments, or maybe you have to commute. These can be the perfect times to sneak in some study and basically be doing two things at once.

I know we all need to relax and wind down every day …I’m not sure if that is a commitment, but we all do it, so why not spend that time watching a movie in your new language rather than doing it in your native language. 

Small changes like this can make a difference and if there is any way you can mix in some language study with something else you are doing it is going to help balance things out. The more balance you have in your life, the less likely you are going to burn out.

(You can read more about – Why Should You Spread Out Your Language Learning Throughout The Day?)

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can see the importance of trying to balance your language learning with other commitments in your life. When things are out of balance you will be easily overwhelmed and quickly exhausted, which a recipe for burn out.

If you can follow the advice I laid out above you should find that your language learning is able to fit in with your already busy life, and while at times you may not be studying as much as you want, your life will be balanced.

Living like this is going to feel a lot healthier and stress free, which is going to make sure you are not getting burnt out and then you can actually focus on making progress with your language studies.   

(You can read more about – What Is Language Burn Out and Why Does It Happen?)