Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

Dreamland Ch. 5: Worldbuilding at 2am, breakfast at noon

Wednesday, July 9th, 2025

There is one thing that any artist understands: the elusive “zone.” The runner’s high of writing. Your brain, your heart, and your fingers forming a holy trinity. The story unfolding on its own. It’s a constant chase, finding the zone. It escapes you, but you don’t escape it. Some people melt into it, some dissolve completely, while some throw pebbles at it until it remembers that you’re still there waiting. I covet this feeling all the time, even when I’m working on schoolwork or writing an email. Hell, even this chapter. I feel the healthiest when I’m at my most productive, and vice versa, but per the last chapter, striking this productive balance is a battle of its own.

Something that’s been fairly difficult to admit to myself is that in order to be productive, I need structure. I’ve always been an imaginative kid at heart, and I’ve always aspired to have free time and flexibility. In my mind, this gives me the space where I have the most control, where I decide what I do, and I determine my own capabilities and limits. Instead, I retreat into a less productive, less ambitious, less willing version of myself, when I am normally very eager to be doing something. Idleness is one of the worst feelings to me, and yet I seek it out so frequently.

If I don’t have something to do in the morning, I don’t get out of bed before 11 AM. Without classes and deadlines, I spend the hours until lunch on my phone or computer doing nothing. In the evening, I might push myself to write half a chapter or work on something for my internship, or at least talk to my friends in a way that feels emotionally or intellectually stimulating. But ultimately, the day ends the way it did the night before, with me thinking to myself, “Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow won’t be a waste.”

In my most introspective moments, I wonder if this regression happens because it’s safer than trying and failing. Safer than realizing I’m not as good as I’ve been made to believe. Safer than confronting my shortcomings. Or I might just be lazy — until, of course, I know that something is expected of me by someone else, and I have a time limit. 

None of us need a Hallmark card to know that the only real failure is a lack of trying. 

Still, the pressure of a blinking cursor near equals the potential. I am just as anxious as I am excited. Every day, I wish I could airlift the beautiful images I’ve conjured in my head and put them to paper without having to lift a finger. I can imagine all I want, and I do, but if I want to write, I have to just write

In my experience, the strategy is to be willing to write without the zone. If you’re a student, or you work, or you just have many obligations, you likely will have long stretches of time only once or twice a week. Which is why you can’t be afraid to just spend five to ten minutes writing uninspired paragraphs of nonsense that you can return to when you’ve actually found the zone, gawk at them because they’re so bad, and edit.

This is a tough habit to contend with because it makes my fear of mediocrity a self-fulfilling prophecy. I delay writing because I don’t want to be bad at it, and every time I try writing, it’s bad — and I just have to accept that. Consider it a sort of exposure therapy, and remember that by writing something, literally anything, you’ve already evaded failure. 

As you do this, structure will follow. You’ll find the times of day that feel the most motivating. You’ll improve as a writer, little by little, until you’re confident enough in writing past those ten minutes, maybe even reaching a whole hour. You’ll realize you have a couple boring, unoccupied hours here and there. Once you develop a willingness to start writing, set timers and do nothing but write until the alarm goes off. You might not begin in a zone, but you’ll induce one and stay there for longer than you expect.

The idea here is to stop crucifying yourself for not meeting your expectations of productivity or quality but to also stop enabling your lazy behavior. Not everyone can naturally fall into an ideal routine, especially in a world with so many things begging for your attention. 

Your attention is so much more valuable than you think. Direct it to fulfilling, meaningful activities. If you think you aren’t good enough, prove yourself wrong. 


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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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Chapter Three: Breaks are Productive

Monday, July 1st, 2024

I always sensed from my Dominican immigrant parents that you had to really justify your breaks and even vacations. I remember feeling guilty for missing a few classes in middle school, even when I was very sick. I remember being in my high school Tae Kwon Do class doing jumping jack exercises, feeling so weak from my period symptoms that I felt I couldn’t jump anymore; yet my instructor kept telling the girls that periods weren’t any excuse not to do the exercises. And those high school days were long running from8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. These were among the many ways I was neglecting my health for the sake of hard work—unsurprisingly this only continued even more during college.

My childhood and adolescence was defined by my studies because that’s how I was taught to view life and success. I was taught that taking breaks was a distraction from continuing to increase your social status and making loads of money; two things that were extremely important for my family. It also felt like because they were themselves so used to the grind, they needed me to do the same in order to understand how much they sacrificed to get me to a decent life in the US. However, I think their view of personal sacrifices for me isn’t entirely accurate.

In some ways, I feel like I have sacrificed my entire self for my parents. I spent much of life building an inauthentic version of myself easy enough for them to manipulate. I prioritized my needs last, leading me to deprive myself of so much I needed in order to survive in the first place. Sometimes, I deprived myself of proper dinners just to work more to feel like I could pay my parental debt in labor. Other times, I gave up on precious sleep—something I am jealous of my twelve-year-old self for doing better—just to re-update my resume and apply for more jobs to feel like I wasn’t doing nothing at home.

If I happened to have too much free time, I couldn’t just journal, write for fun, listen to music, or chat with friends online without it feeling like I wasn’t being productive enough. Labor was the way my existence was justified. It was the way my parents felt I could properly honor them and even God. Even better if I could just handle doing it all as modern women are expected to. Clean. Cook. Babysit. Console. Get Paid. Being a woman was itself a full-time job with little benefits as I have come to face it more and more each day. And quitting was not a choice.

I have found that making time for both journaling and walking are forms of exercise I can easily do every day without hurting my wallet, my mind, or my body. One being more mental and the other being more physical, they still mirror each other in that they both keep me active and release me from self-containment—like I mentioned in the previous chapter. I have also found that journaling and walking facilitate each other, especially when I am in as open of a space as my college campus.

An empty train cart all to myself 🙂

These exercises encouraged me to continue tapping into my sense of interoception, one of the many other senses we humans have but aren’t too aware of. As a woman, I am aware that I have been spending a lot of time inside my head and haven’t given those feelings proper release out into the world. It almost felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin and transform into a butterfly in order to fly away from my problems. But I had to learn to love living in my human body and find my natural habitat—a place where I could smile, yell, laugh, and cry at a high volume without shame.

College was a break from home and everything else that came before it. College might cause some to grind even harder if they aren’t careful enough, but it gave me a resting place to slow down. Breaks, regardless of what they are breaks from, are productive because you have the space to properly enjoy yourself. You’re able to let your brain breathe, let yourself be inspired by the world, take notice of beautiful sights nature gifts you, and listen to your body when it may be telling you are consuming too much energy. If anything, your breaks allow you to be a proper student of life. Exactly why you shouldn’t let labor be your master.


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By Daeli Vargas

Daeli is a recent graduate from the City College of New York with a BA in English and a publishing certificate. She is from the Bronx and is very passionate about all things literary. She hopes one day to publish many books of her own and share her passions worldwide.


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