Every college student struggles with time management, with classes piling upon classes and the additional pressure to build your resume with clubs, jobs, internships. They say every hour of your day should be spent investing in the rest of your life, which leaves nanoseconds for fostering hobbies and interests. But over time, it gets easier. I’m surely not the first to say to you that you should allow yourself free time; that in itself is investment in your future. If you have it figured out, congratulations.
I do not.
It’s not so much that I overbook my time or even procrastinate. More often than not, I frontload my work and finish all my smaller tasks before the weekend. I take pride in my work ethic when it comes to my academic life, but the remaining time is no man’s land, a space where a million obligations orbit and eclipse one another. When I’m writing, I think to myself that I should be applying to jobs. When I’m applying to jobs or generally lengthening my resume, I want to be writing because it feels more meaningful. I often end up doing neither, and the idleness at once comforts me and tugs at my skin.
This is only a dilemma because my brain compartmentalizes these two activities — writing books, and working toward a good resume — as not only different things but polar opposites. There is a solid rationale here. I’m not pursuing creative writing as my full-time career, which means I have to find other things I’m interested in that suit me. That’s what I suggest everyone does. However, I find myself also separating the pursuit of stability and the pursuit of fulfillment and creativity.
I end up prioritizing quantity over quality. In many ways, this works. You should apply to and try out as many things as possible to find what you like. But sometimes this habit decays into an ingrained psychology where what I’m interested in does not matter. Anything will do, as long as I am doing it.
In practice, I haven’t done anything that I absolutely despise. Not yet, at least. But no matter what I do, I feel that I should be doing more, something better, something that plants a direct line to six figures by my mid-twenties. I don’t actually care that much about money, but that lack of care itself is a huge privilege that I might someday lose. Rent is so expensive everywhere, entry-level positions require master’s degrees, eggs are a million dollars, and I still haven’t made time to write today.
The more I spiral, the sillier and guiltier I feel worrying about problems that I created. Isn’t it so terrible that I can’t manage my time at a prestigious university because I get insecure sometimes? There’s no “but” here. It really is just silly. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to waste the amazing opportunities I’ve had by making no solid, practical plans for a job, but I also don’t want to waste my capacity to care about things outside of these plans.
Like me, you may be a natural creative and plan to pursue something adjacent to that passion (or entirely separate from that passion, even) with your creative outlet on the side. Like me, you may not know which you should focus on at any given time, because each is unfulfilling in its own way, emotionally or financially. The best advice I can give you is to avoid thinking of your creative passion as lesser or smaller and instead let it run parallel to your practical pursuits.
I’m sort of stating the obvious here, I know, but it’s very easy to abandon parts of yourself when you grow up, and that abandonment begins in your formative years. In between classes and other obligations, you should be making time to tend to your lifelong dreams, even if they end up having nothing to do with your career. Don’t treat them as a waste, and don’t even treat them as a hobby. Treat them as sustenance, the very essence of you.
And if you want some even better advice, make a schedule for each week. Life-changing.
By Oshmi Ghosh
Oshmi Ghosh is a rising junior at NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English with minors in Creative Writing, History, and Entertainment Business. You can usually find her appreciating the simple things in life: tea with milk and sugar, a good book, and/or intensely competitive board games.
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