It's coming down to a rough part of the year: finals.

When finals week comes around, it can often take over our lives, but sports fans just can't allow that to happen. There are way too many great events going on this time of the year. Between the NFL regular season winding down and the college basketball season finishing up its non-conference schedule, you can't afford to miss out on the action.

Luckily, there is a way to keep up with sports and school; it just requires some time management. So I have put together a five-step method for balancing your sports and studies.

1. Know what sporting events are coming up. Check your go-to sports Web site or the Remote Control section in the Dayton Daily News sports section to see what is going to be on TV or ESPN360.com. There are all kinds of schedules available, so it is important to know where and when the games are taking place. That way, you know if you can watch it at home on your TV or computer, or if you'll have to go to Milano's or BW3's for a game, like you would for one of those awful NFL network games with Matt Millen doing the color commentary.

2. Set aside some time before the event. For example, if you know one of your favorite teams is playing at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday (like the Dayton Flyers were going to as I was writing this article), then have some time to do your work before 7 p.m. Hopefully you're not in classes until that time. If you do, there's not much I can do to help you. Finish your homework a day in advance so you have none, in that case. At any rate, have time to do homework before the game happens so you are ideally done by the time it starts.

3. Watch some sports. This is the fun part of the five-step plan. You get to actually enjoy yourself. Kick back, relax and turn on the TV. If you live in Founders or Stuart, sorry, you probably can't do the kicking back portion because there isn't enough room. You get the idea, though. Turn on the TV or head to the bar and enjoy the game. Take some deep breaths, enjoy the incredible feeling of not studying. That is the key to this step-don't study or do homework. Don't even have your notes or whatever on your lap. Just focus on the game, and give your brain a break.

4. Utilize halftimes and timeouts effectively. If you don't quite finish your homework as a result of step two, that's what commercials are for. TV timeouts and halftime are great times to get a couple minutes of work in. If you are watching at home, get up and sprint back to your computer or notebook and keep studying or doing work. Just make sure to have a spotter near the TV to yell at you and let you know when the game is about to come back on. It can be an exhausting dance to sprint back and forth from TV to homework, but it's worth the workout when you finish that much earlier.

5. Keep tabs on the Internet. Look, even the best made plans don't always work out. Sometimes, there are factors working against you, like a group project in which the rest of your group doesn't understand the sanctity of sports. Somehow, you get stuck in that group, and every time, they schedule a meeting right in the middle of a big game. It's devastating. So if this awful thing happens to you, or you have so much homework that you can't justify wasting any time watching sports, there is still one thing you can do. Go to ESPN.com (that's my choice anyway, other sites are fine if you like them better), and pull up a gametracker of whatever game you wanted to watch. Then you can at least check the score for a couple seconds and look at what players are doing well. You can at least keep your sanity that way.

There you have it. I hope that you can keep yourselves from permanently falling into the doldrums of studying for finals and nothing else. Everyone has to break things up a bit during finals week. I know for sure this helps me get better grades on my finals, so give it a try.