Today I spent most of my day studying and focusing on school work. However, it felt like the more I studied, the less I knew. “If only I had more time,” I thought.

Fast forward to dinner today to the conversation I had with my partner for a class project. Jokingly, we were talking about how unhealthy the dining hall food was. We lamented about how meal prepping and cooking healthy meals takes a lot of time; time that we as full-time students “don’t have”.

I’m sure almost all of us have felt this way. We’ve all felt the need for more time, whether it was to study more, cook, catch up on sleep, or something else.

The thing is, we do have a lot of time, at least more than there used to be. Unlike our ancestors, we don’t need to spend hours washing clothes or walking to every relatively nearby destination. We don’t spend 6 months (or more) traveling across the seas. We don’t even do simple tasks like organizing files manually anymore. So why, in the modern era, do we still say we don’t have enough time?

Everything is in a balance– kind of like the ancient ideologies of yin-yang or karma; for everything good, there’s also bad. For every decision, there’s a consequence. When our work decreased, our expectation of productivity increased too, balancing out the hypothetical scale. There are two main reasons we often feel we don’t have enough time.

1. The first is that we aren’t prioritizing our most important tasks. Of course, doing so is easier said than done. Sometimes our most important tasks aren’t always what we value or want to do. Sometimes, we have too many things going on, which makes it difficult to decide what we need to prioritize. These are issues of procrastination (anxiety) and/or self-discipline.
2. Second, if you do prioritize your tasks well and still don’t have enough time, you’re probably actually doing more than what you’re physically able to keep up with. The extreme of this is called “workaholism”, or being addicted to work even to the point of overworking oneself. Being unable to make boundaries to work and productivity is extremely common. Again, the expeditions for an intense level of productivity is ingrained within all of us since birth. We want to prove we can do everything. Dealing with this pressure and anxiety can really take a toll on each of us, and I really recommend journaling it out in order to self-reflect: Why do you care about productivity and which of your activities do you truly value?

I don’t believe that we as human “be”-ings do very well with just “BE”-ing. We are constantly thinking, acting, and do-ing. However, with the difference in activities from our ancestors, there’s now a major opportunity: we can choose to do activities that we truly value.

Till next time,

Moesha.