Although earning an MBA provides plenty of advantages to your life, having free time while you are attaining one is not one of them. However, it is essential for you to have a nice work-life balance for your own sanity, something you need to keep if you are going to complete all of the work that goes into attaining that valuable piece of paper. In fact, ensuring you have a life outside of your MBA work will help you be even more productive in your coursework.

1. Exercise

This definitely fits the bill as the time you put into exercise is paid back to you more than enough to ensure that the time commitment is worth it in the long run. This is partly because one of exercise’s best benefits is helping create useful brain chemicals, allowing it to work much more expeditiously. Also, exercise provides you with a badly needed escape from the rest of your world. This is especially true for runners who can really escape, oftentimes into the woods or otherwise far from home. However, even an escape to the gym across the street is enough.

2. Sleep

Although you may be surrounded by people who almost seem to be bragging about how little sleep they got last night – or in the past week – due to all of the work they had to do, sleep is another example of something that pays you back what you put into it. A lack of this essential life process hurts your ability to learn and recall what you were taught. It is important to remember that more important than getting that piece of paper is remembering what you learned so that you can use it in the real world while having a long, successful career.

3. Take Mini-Vacations

Although it is very tempting to simply work through any vacation periods in your academic calendar, you need that time to recharge your batteries and avoid burnout. For that reason, it is important to make sure that you incorporate mini-vacation periods from time to time. Even people training to run a marathon take rest days; you should too. Of course, with that said, you do want to be flexible as there will definitely be some periods when you will have to work through a previously set-aside vacation period; just make sure that you postpone it, not eliminate it.

4. Limit Your Class Load

This may seem obvious to some, but it needs to be said. In order to ensure that you have a nice work-life balance, make sure that you do not set yourself up for being overworked by doing something like taking 12 credits in a semester. In most situations, that is too many, especially if you have other life responsibilities such as a job or family to take care of. It is also best if you take fewer classes your first semester or quarter and then increase your course load in later ones if you can handle the work load than it is to start off in an overambitious manner.

5. Live Close to School

Many underestimate the importance of this, but the amount of time and effort that it takes to simply go to class or head to campus for group meetings really adds up over a couple of years, and that is time that could be better used to incorporate some non-MBA activities into your life and ensure that you have a positive work-life balance. This is an especially valuable point for those who will drive to school as people who take public transportation can multi-task en route. However, living within walking distance of your school would be perfect.

Of course, your focus should be on earning that MBA, but you do need to ensure that you have at least a little bit of balance in your life. Doing so will help you finish your degree as well as infuse a sense of balance into your life that you can carry with you into the workforce.