We’re All Different Types of Busy.

College campuses are teeming with busy people. Whether it’s a student, a professor, or a staff member, it’s not uncommon to hear “I’ve been so busy” as a response to the classic how-have-you-been question.

Being busy is nice. And I say the word nice in that dodgy way one says nice–the kind of “nice” that is more of a filler than a describer word because in reality, maybe you’re kind of annoyed by how busy you are. And take it from me–as a senior at a high achieving public university, I know what it means to be busy. It’s not uncommon for students to enter every semester here thinking they’re going to scale down and do less and really just “focus on what’s important” to then realize three weeks into the semester that you’ve sold your soul away, again.

That busy can mean many different things to many people, but most of the time, it contains some combination of classes, work, extracurricular activities, and a social life. Not to mention having to add in sleep, eating well, and exercising. College seems to be a constant challenge of trying to find a balance amongst all of these things and kind of failing miserably because most of the time you realize that a balance is almost impossible and you end up sacrificing one thing over the other.

But as a person that likes being busy, I like being busy in a certain way, and different types of busy can be healthy and efficient for different people. For me, I realized early on that I cannot live without sleep; I have never and will never pull an all-nighter to finish any work, no matter how important. That prioritization of sleep has, surprisingly, made me better at time management when it comes to finishing my work. On the flipside, my social life took a hit during my junior year and I have slowly recovered it.

I also realized that I was getting involved in extracurriculars more out of a sense of duty rather than enjoyment or passion. Learning to say no to certain expectations of me allowed me to focus my energy on the causes I really wanted to get behind. In the end, this led to larger satisfaction in my outside of school involvement because I actually felt that I was contributing rather than spreading myself thin amongst different priorities.

And ultimately, I found that the key to staying busy, but in a manageable way, was acknowledging and valuing my time as my own. People and events in our lives ask a lot of us sometimes, and sometimes it’s okay and good to say no. The world will continue to spin because at the end of the day, even when we fail at prioritizing something over the other, or of making time for things that are important and good for us, there’s always the next day.

Senior me is actually proud of past me for developing all of this throughout three years of university. And although I don’t have it all figured out, I’ve found something that works as long as I continue to work towards it. And that, for me, is the best way to stay busy; that is until I graduate and busy becomes an entirely new ballpark!

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