Learning to Stay Busy, Balanced, and Burnout-Free

Work hard, play hard, rest harder!

Ever since I turned twenty, I’ve been struck with an irrational fear of “living a boring life” (see footnote). Something about the death of your teenage years slipping through your calendar makes you want to start shovelling memories into your biography. Regardless, this obsession began to shape the way I perceived my actions and how I reflected on my day-to-day. I strived to actively participate, foster meaningful communities around me, and try new things every single day!

I started to practice playing the guitar more, developed more ridiculous projects, started a blog, joined the Google Students Developers Club @ McMaster, tried to learn piano, explored local coffee shops, joined an intramurals soccer team, started reading more, tried embroidery (???), became the Software Lead the McMaster Biomedical Technical Team, attended a book tour, expanded my music taste, created course content as a teaching assistant and ran optional workshops, started baking weekly, bought some more plants, went to more concerts, made new friends … you get the point. Sounds great, right?

Not exactly.

See, I was achieving my goals: every day felt new and exciting! I was pursuing my passions, giving everything a chance, and it brought so much value to my life. But, at the end of the day, it’s normally night. No matter how much you plan to do in a day, you can’t ignore fundamental needs in your life. I began skipping the gym, I was sleeping less to work ahead in classes to be available to plans I had already committed to later in the week, and I’d accidentally skip meals to squeeze as much time from my day as possible.

I lost 12 pounds in the month of September. Sure, I was always having a blast with those around me, exploring my interests, or being productive, but that amount of weight in that timespan was NOT negligible. The lack of sleep began to catch up with me, and I was losing efficiency at every study session. This was the wake-up call: I needed to take better care of my needs. The only way to continue to balance school, work, extracurriculars, a social life, and (last, sometimes accidentally least) my health, was to be more intentional and organized with my time.

My Improved Organized Workflow:

Calendar

So how did I change? For starters… Google Calendar. I promise this post has more insight than just using a calendar program, but I cannot stress how much a well-organized calendar has changed my life. My Google Calendar hosts many different calendars, such that I can toggle through different aspects of my life (School, Personal, Work, ECs, etc) and see what is taking the most bandwidth in my life. I will also use the description section of an event to store important notes as I learn them from meetings.

I update my calendar at least once a day (often several times). As we’ll see in the next sections, an up-to-date calendar is the basis for the entirety of my organizational process.

Agile Workflows

Last side tangent, I promise! Anyone who has worked in SWE knows about the agile/scrum process, which is typically used in project management to ensure the efficiency of a team. To (poorly) boil it down, time is divided into “sprints” usually lasting 1-4 weeks. A set of objectives is assigned at the start of a sprint to be completed during the duration of the sprint. A project manager will conduct regular meetings (known as “Stand Up”) to be updated on the work of the team, identify any blockers or potential issues, and smoothen the process. At the end of the sprint, a retrospective meeting is held to reflect on what went well, how we can improve, and strategies to employ during the next sprint.

Great, why do these buzzwords matter? As corporate as it sounds, my workflow is heavily based around agile principles and the structure of sprints and stand-ups.

How I Stay Organized:

Here’s what this week and the following week (November 23rd, 2025, to December 6th, 2025) look like for Ahmed Zafar: Before we begin, note the following:

• The calendar is colour-coded (small line to the left of every event) using the classification of “School, Personal, Work, and ECs” that I mentioned before.
• Assignments, or tasks that are to be completed but do not have a specific time slot, are seen at the top (ex: Assignment #4 Due - 3A03).

My calendars hold all of my strict deadlines. These are events I cannot move around or must have completed. This includes assignments, lectures, club meetings, or strict plans I have made (casual plans do not necessarily need to be logged). This means I know my strict availability at all times, and I can plan my productive sessions or looser plans accordingly.

At the start of each week, I plan out my sprint (every sprint is one week). I view the current week and the following week to plan which tasks I should have completed. For example, this week I must complete my close my GDSC webscraping ticket for the presentation, prepare to run a workshop as a TA, complete my Signals and Systems Quiz, marking, and prepare to lead club meetings. Furthermore, I see that I have four final projects to complete the following week, so I will include two of them in my current sprint. I preemptively decide that next week’s sprint should be used to complete the remaining two. And study for final exams (3/5 finals fall the week after).

I keep track of my sprint tasks using the “Reminders” Application on my phone: At the start of each week, I “get my ducks in a row” and populate my weekly to-do list with the tasks previously identified. Additionally, I add internal, or soft, deadlines to each task. This allows me to mentally map out each day of the week and prevents me from overworking myself. If I complete all tasks that I have assigned to myself that day, I can begin something scheduled for later in the week, or relax semi-guilt-free.

This to-do list has also helped reduce the amount of time wasted during the initial half hour of trying to work, as there is no need to prioritize tasks on the spot: It’s easy to plan/know what to work on when you’ve scheduled in advance.

Every day, before I begin my first scheduled task, I conduct a pseudo-stand-up. I consider what needs to be done today, what was completed yesterday, and whether or not there are tasks on the backlog that need to be moved to a future deadline. I also plan when I will complete tasks that I have scheduled for the day.

Then I do it all again the next week!

Future Steps:

I am FAR from perfect in following or designing this system. It is, at its core, a calendar and to-do list. yikes.

• Moving forward, I would like to replace the Reminders app for my weekly goals. Ideally, I’d like to use a kanban board. Being able to synchronise tasks from my laptop and phone would be useful! Indicating a status on the tasks to complete that week would also make my progress visible at a glance. I am considering tools like Notion to host this, but have not yet decided. Open to suggestions!
• I’d also like to run some automations on this process. Being able to autopopulate my weekly goals, even if it meant fine-tuning them myself later, would be phenomenal! I am considering leveraging the shortcuts application on my phone to send tasks to my to-do list every time I miss a lecture, but I have not yet studied the technical feasibility of this.

It was important to me that a system like this didn’t impede my ability to be spontaneous. I love all the work I have to do, but I also pride myself on being flexible and having an active social life 😭 😭. Two weeks ago, I spent my first Friday night of the school year alone to do work… and felt tired of it 30 minutes in. This system was not designed to contort every minute of my life into maximizing productivity, or to turn myself into this “10x engineer”. This was built to help stabilize my time and grant me more structure to do the things I enjoy :). You can do anything, but certainly not everything. Take care of yourselves.

Talk soon, Ahmed

Footnote:

I’d like to acknowledge that being busy and the ability to pursue my passions are nothing short of a privilege. I am absurdly lucky to attend a post-secondary institution, study the program of my dreams, exhaust myself doing the things I love, and build my career and relationships. I urge everyone to reflect on the opportunities they have been given :)