Accept that a serious outside commitment costs something, then protect rest deliberately rather than by accident. Logan practised piano three to five hours a day, still ranked fourth in NSW for English Extension, and says the thing he most regrets cutting was exercise.
What does the trade-off actually look like?
Logan graduated as Dux of the Conservatorium High School with a 99.7 ATAR and ranked fourth in NSW for English Extension 1 with 49 out of 50, while practising piano three to five hours a day. He is clear that this was a choice, and clear about its price: roughly six hours of sleep a night, which he does not recommend.
His framing is more useful than the usual advice. If you want to take on that much, that is a personal choice to make. Just know that it will cost you when the going gets tough. The honesty is the value here, because the alternative framing, that you can do everything at full intensity, is the one that produces burnout.
He was fortunate socially. A cohort of 40 in a school of 140, all under the same pressure, meant nobody had to explain themselves. That is not available to most students, and it is worth naming as luck rather than method.
Curriculum-aligned study guides take some of that load off, which matters most when your week is already committed elsewhere.
What did he wish he had protected?
Sport, unambiguously. Year 12 at his school had no timetabled sport, and having occasionally tagged along on a free Friday afternoon, he could feel the difference. His argument is not about fitness. It is that ambient stress accumulates across a long year in ways that are not immediately obvious: cognitive function declines, attitude sours, and you start resenting the work.
He is also alert to why this advice gets dismissed. Well-being sessions telling you to get eight hours and go for a jog are easy to scoff at, and when you are making a genuine trade-off between an hour of rest and an hour of essay practice, rest looks trivial. His counter is that the rest is what lets you hit the books harder afterwards, so even on purely utilitarian grounds it pays.
The trap he names is precise: the moment you most need the break is the moment you are least willing to take it.
- Sunlight and cardio, even an hour
- Sleep, which he cut and would not cut again
- Time genuinely away from the phone rather than scrolling
How did he actually work on English?
By drafting relentlessly. His discursive piece, recycled between Advanced and Extension, went through over 20 iterations of the same core draft, and shifted topic substantially early on. He treats that as the point of drafting rather than a sign of a false start: time spent redrafting is time in which new connections form.
The other half was getting out of his own head. English students micromanage structure and language until the writing becomes dense and inward. His fix was talking: mind mapping a text by putting it in the middle of a page and ranting onto paper, then taking the work to teachers and friends and arguing about it.
He describes hounding his teachers for feedback until they were faintly annoyed, which he considers fair since that is what they are there for. If you do not have that access, expert essay marking on a draft serves a similar function: an outside read that tells you where the clunkiness is before an examiner finds it.
Frequently asked questions
Can you do a serious extracurricular and still get a top ATAR?
Yes, but not without cost. Logan practised three to five hours daily and ranked fourth in NSW, on roughly six hours of sleep. He is explicit that the sleep debt was a bad trade and that the commitment will cost you somewhere.
How many drafts should a discursive piece go through?
Logan wrote over 20 iterations of one core draft. The number matters less than the habit: redrafting is where you catch shortcomings and where new connections form, which is difficult to rush.
What is the most underrated thing to protect in Year 12?
Exercise and time outdoors. Ambient stress accumulates invisibly across the year, degrading cognitive function and motivation, and an hour of sunlight or cardio does more to restore both than an extra hour of notes.
How do you stop overthinking an English essay?
Get it out of your head. Mind map the text by ranting onto paper, then talk the piece through with a teacher or a peer. Reading your own work aloud also exposes clunky phrasing you will not see on the page.
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