Student Notebook: Using Self-Regulation to Balance Commitments

Managing commitments can be a lifelong challenge. As a student, you might be juggling a heavy course load while engaging in campus activities, student organizations, and on- or off-campus jobs. Graduate students typically balance assistantships, internships, and research, as well. Sometimes, it may feel like too much to handle. Despite feeling overwhelmed, balancing commitments is achievable—but it can be challenging. Understanding your goals, your motivation, and the tools available to you are key to handling everything on your plate.

We can approach balancing commitments through self-regulation skills (Bandura, 1989, 1991, 2001, 2006; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1997; Zimmerman, 1989). Self-regulation can be conceptualized as a three-phase cyclical process (Schunk & DiBenedetto, 2020; Zimmerman, 2008):

1. Forethought,where we create a game plan to meet the requirements of our commitments based on our goals, motivation, and available tools.
2. Performance, where we are in the thick of our commitments and apply our tools and motivation to reach our goals.
3. Reflection, where we think through how the process of addressing our commitments went, consider our motivation and what tools were effective, and whether we achieved our goals.

The results of our reflection then feed back into forethought, and the cycle begins again.

The forethought phase may be reassuring for students when managing obligations to which they have already committed. We can start by thinking about what is motivating us to engage in these obligations. Is this a commitment I need to engage in, or one I want to engage in? Why have I committed to this? Do I think I can do well with this commitment?

Once we know the driving force behind each commitment, we can prioritize the urgency, develop a timeline, and set our goals for each commitment (Pinochet-Quiroz et al., 2022; Saunders & More, 2025). Does this commitment come with its own timeline? How complicated is the commitment? Can I break the commitment down into different parts? How long will a specific task take me to complete?

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Now, with our understanding of the motivation behind the commitment and the related goals, we can think through the resources we have to fulfill those commitments and meet those goals. Who do we know who can help us? What tools do we have to reach our goals? What do we know, and what are we missing as we address this commitment?

It takes a lot of preparatory work, but when we move into the next phase—performance—we will already have just about everything we need at our fingertips! We know what we are doing, when we are doing it, the tools we have, and a plan for how to get there. Now it’s time to give it a go, while keeping track of our actions and the logic behind them. Keeping track of progress might look like a log of hours spent on cleaning a dataset, checking items off of a homework to-do list, using stitch markers in that sweater you’re knitting, or journaling to see progress toward your reading goals. How you observe yourself will be specific to your preferences and the task at hand; the goal is simply to walk away understanding what you did and why (Bandura, 2001; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1997; Zimmerman, 1989). Keeping track of work makes it easier to reflect during the last phase of self-regulation.

When we reflect, we think about the outcomes of our commitments. How do I feel about how I did, and why? What worked this time, and what should I address next time? Was this commitment worth it this time? Should there be a next time? Reflecting opens the door to individual growth. If I commit to a bake sale and my chocolate chip cookies come out perfect, but my lemon bars refuse to set and become a soupy disaster, I need to sit down and reflect. Do I need a different recipe? Should I have used a silicone pan instead? Maybe I needed medium instead of jumbo eggs? Maybe bake sales are too stressful for me? Reflecting allows us to learn what helps us meet our goals to honor our commitments, and what we should (and should not) commit to. We take what we learn back into the forethought phase, decide if we should agree to a similar commitment going forward, and how to rise to the challenge if we commit (Schunk & DiBenedetto, 2020; Schunk & Zimmerman, 1997).

When applying the self-regulation cycle, we may find that a commitment does not align with who we are, what we want, or what we need. Given that our time is spread across existing commitments, we may turn new ones down (Bandura, 1989, 2006). This boundary is likely the most challenging barrier we will encounter around commitments. However, if a commitment does not align with who we are, and it is not mandatory, saying “no” allows us to use forethought to achieve the goals that are most meaningful to us. If we are practicing finding balance, sometimes we just have to say, “Not my monkeys, not my circus!”

We each carry unique personal, family, and professional or vocational commitments, in parallel with the commitments we have as part of our student identity. These are the monkeys that we want to care for using our self-regulation skills (via forethought, performance, and reflection) to ensure our personal circus runs smoothly (Zimmerman, 2008). All of these domains and their related commitments deserve attention; through attending to our whole self, we learn to better regulate ourselves to meet our own needs and use that growth to reach personally meaningful goals.

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