How do you get it done? You maximize your time. Cut out those unecessary things like sleep and social life. Lol, although some people take it to extremes, its all about balance...

Instead of spending another few hours developing your studio project, you need to set aside a certain time block to work on the other classes. The program is meant to teach you time management, but if you have those qualities going in, it helps tremendously. That is the area where most students have trouble.
Learn how much time it takes you to do certain drawings or model a building and schedule your time accordingly. This helps prepare for the working world also.

Studio does take the brunt of your time since design is a very labor intensive practice without an endpoint, you have to learn when to cut yourself off though. The more comfortable you are with the tools before you start, the easier and faster the experience in school. I would learn some 2D, 3D, and graphic design programs before school starts (they generally won't teach you too much anyway), this will give you more time to work on other courses.

It depends on where you go to school...there are some programs where students can slide by with hardly doing anything and somehow still graduate, then there are programs where everyone in your class is working 90-100 hours a week, every week, all the way through the program (I am not exaggerating at all) with proper time management. The amount of hours one is required to take a semester varies from program to program and can have a large bearing on how many hours per week you have to put into school. Someone with a studio and one elective (9 credit hours) won't have to spend as much time as someone with studio plus four other classes (18 credit hrs)....

what is the standard credits per semester? is it 15 like undergrad? do people actually take 18 or 9? 9 is like part time..is that even possible?

i know you are just using these numbers to demonstrate work load and time management, but i am curious...is it best to just take 15 or 12?

in the end employers only want to know what you can do to help them get their presentations done. no one ever asked me about that paper i wrote about Arata Isozaki's Penis shaped building or Kenneth Noland's influence on Frank Gehry. In fact, most employers are only interested in their cars and golf. Not too many conversations about the Deluezian fold outside of academia.

but that's because no one talks about deleuze or guattari anymore, vado, not because theory is not part of practice.

arts courses teach how to think and organise thoughts and its a very important/useful skill. but in general i found all the arts courses to be easy A's compared to the workload of architecture related courses, which did require sleepless nights to get an A, at least once in a while.

the great mystery about deadlines is that they are always met, even when they are impossible. i don't know why or how but its always the case. very strange phenomenon.

There was a significant amount of reading required for some of my history and theory courses, but by the end of the semester I bet I was reading about 1/4 of the "required" text. I was still able to get a pretty decent grade, since most of my classmates were doing the same thing. Also, a lot of professors of non-studio classes would structure the workload to be less intense towards the end of the semester, which would let you focus on your studio ptoject.

this is all very helpful, thanks!