5 Tips to Successfully Manage Your Time While Earning Your MBA

Earning an MBA is a great career move—but it’s not easy. How do you balance graduate studies with work and life demands? Learn how one professional made it happen.

Kaitlin McHargue Fedro knows the intense pressure of taking a full MBA course load while working full time in a demanding field—all while newly married. To make sure she managed her time successfully, Fedro set up a system to organize her schedule when her graduate studies began.

“It definitely wasn't easy. Finishing my MBA was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done as an adult and as a professional,” Fedro said. “There were some time management things that I did that helped keep me organized and break things up into more manageable chunks.”

Fedro earned a BS in Family and Consumer Sciences from Baylor in 2015. Right away she landed a role at the Heart of Texas Region MHMR Center teaching intervention strategies to families of infants and toddlers with developmental and mental health needs. She was promoted quickly and gained a much broader view of operations. She learned that with direct funding from the state falling, in order to provide services, the organization would increasingly rely on revenue through billing Medicaid and private insurance companies.

“What I saw through the work that I did was the need for business-minded leadership of these kinds of social services programs in the community,” Fedro said. “I realized that if I believed that these services were essential—and that they’re part of building a vibrant and well-functioning society for future generations—then I really needed to invest in a business degree.”

Fedro’s goal was to become a leader and apply business knowledge to contribute to the organization’s health. When she started researching MBA programs, her first choice was Baylor, where she had enjoyed her experience as an undergraduate. She chose the university’s online MBA program, which would give her the flexibility to continue working full time while taking multiple courses each term.

“I was not someone who ever thought that I would get a business degree. [However], business touches every aspect of what I do, even in a nonprofit organization,” Fedro said. “The skills that I learned for communication, for leadership and for good, solid operations management are absolutely so valuable to what I’m doing.”

5 Ways to Manage Your Time

Fedro found five ways to successfully manage her time during her MBA studies.

1. Create a Schedule

As soon as her course schedule was set each term, Fedro created a spreadsheet to serve as a virtual planner for all her courses. She went through each syllabus, highlighting tasks and due dates and adding them to the spreadsheet. Every step in the process was assigned a time slot: readings, lectures, homework and test preparation.

“Planning out how I was going to be spending my time through the entire seven weeks that I was in each course really helped me focus in on just what I needed to do on that particular day and not worry what was coming in the next couple of days. Otherwise, if I was looking at the whole term at once, it just felt too overwhelming,” Fedro said.

2. Build in a Buffer Zone

The format gave her the flexibility to adjust as needed—adding more time for homework in a tougher course, for example, and dialing back in another. But Fedro stood firm on one strategy: She gave herself a two-day minimum buffer between an assignment’s due date and the date she set to complete it.

This brought more than a sense of completion, Fedro said. For one, it meant she could ask her professors questions or get feedback on earlier iterations of her completed work. It also showed her where she might have to allot more time.

“Getting that timely feedback as we were going through the courses really helped me tweak the way I was approaching the material,” she said.

3. Make Time for Deep Work

When Fedro was taking more than one course at a time, she planned her week so that she could finish work for one course on consecutive days before moving on to the next course assignments. This sort of concentrated focus time, free of distractions, was essential for peak productivity.

“That helped me to focus my time and my energy on one course at a time,” Fedro said. “That way I wasn't having to switch my brain back and forth between content for each course.”

4. Do ‘Tomorrow You’ a Favor

Fedro had a mantra that helped her buckle down and stay on track: “I would tell myself: Do the thing today that ‘Tomorrow Kate’ will thank you for.”

So even on days when she knew she had a time buffer, she’d remind herself that “my tomorrow self is not going to be happy that she still has to do this assignment when my today self could have just buckled down and gotten it done.”

This meant practicing discipline to stick with the schedule she had made for herself. Self-discipline was the glue that made her schedule work. “That’s probably the biggest thing, the discipline. It wasn’t fun staying up until midnight most nights and then getting up first thing in the morning and going to work, and then getting a 15-minute break on my drive home from work, and then immediately starting homework again,” Fedro said, laughing. “But that’s what it took to get things done.”

5. Set Expectations at Home

Fedro could not have devoted the time she needed to study if her husband had not been on board. “You’ve got to be able to flex somewhere because nobody can do absolutely everything,” she said. “For me, what that meant was having some really upfront and honest discussions with my husband about what my contribution at home was going to realistically look like during the two years that I was in the program. It really needs to be a family decision. It’s not just me making this commitment—it’s everybody around me.”

Though the online MBA program was demanding, faculty, too, were supportive. When the pandemic upended work and life routines, they were flexible with deadlines, understanding that sometimes life throws curveballs, Fedro said. Their willingness confirmed her decision to bring business principles into her nonprofit work.

“If you’ve never considered business or you’ve always thought that business is dry or doesn't have a lot of feeling and heart to it, that’s not true. There’s probably something that every professional could gain from a program like the one at Baylor.”

What's Next

Want to know more about Baylor’s online MBA program? Explore our detailed program page. Still unsure about which MBA program format may best fit your lifestyle and needs? Our admissions advisers can help you determine the best path forward. Complete the form below and our team will contact you directly.

Request More Information