Years ago while a graduate student my wife and I bought a small home with a partially unfinished basement. It had been trashed by former student renters and though it was a lot of work, we got a good deal. Wanting to save money, we remodeled the basement and rented out the upstairs of the house to four girls who were also going to school. They made our house payment and though the downstairs apartment was not as nice as the upstairs apartment it served us well and helped us toward the goal of finishing graduate school. We had two small bedrooms, a bathroom, living room and a kitchen. We had one child when we moved in and two more of our four children were born while we lived in that home.
As an undergraduate student I had taken a course from a Dean Sorenson. One of his favorite sayings was, “The Good is the Greatest Enemy of the Best.” What he meant by that is that we are not so much side tracked from doing what is best by doing something really bad, but by doing something good. Let me give you an example. Over the years that we lived in the house I mentioned, without fail, around mid term and finals time the girls would really clean the house. This didn’t matter if they were going to continue to be living there or not, it would be thoroughly cleaned. The reason, I believe, was that they needed to be studying. That was the best thing they could be doing at that point in time, but when they took a break, they couldn’t just waste their time, they had to do something important. Steven Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People talks about a similar concept in his comparisons of “urgent” and “important.” http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~tanguay/7intro.htm https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits.php
While it is important to have a balanced life and take breaks as needed, understanding and acknowledging what you are doing can be an important aspect of accomplishing your goals.
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