Don’t let your idle time be wasted time

One of the most challenging aspects of college life is time management. It may well be the toughest subject to learn. Responsibilities and opportunities and academics bombard us from all sides, ravaging our time as if it were a flimsy bomb shelter. And this fact, that college life is stressful, is so well-known that stating it is flirting with cliché.

Yet, I still think it is worth stating: College is stressful. And it is stressful because being a student is hardly enough. We are told from the beginning that a committed student is not the ideal student. Do not focus exclusively on your studies, we are told, but get involved, get internships, do research, lead a club, go to sporting events, etc. Employers want interesting, involved and busy people, not students who took naps on the Plaza.  

I mostly agree with these sentiments. College is more than studying. But the trade-off to being involved is having smaller margins in our schedule: less time for studying, pleasure reading, hiking, friends and countless more. If student life is a garden, our time is the soil in which our college experience grows. The more seeds you plant, the less nutrients there are to go around.

Naturally, how we focus our time is essential to how we experience college, which is to say that our time is sacred. I’m not sure, though, if many of us see our schedules in this way. Indeed, sizeable chunks of our day we see as intrinsically useless, hence the phrase “killing time.”

Ten minutes at the bus stop, 20 minutes before class, an hour before our friend comes over — our default tendency is to preoccupy ourselves until these interludes pass and the main event begins. And this preoccupation almost always takes the form of a head slightly bent, staring at a phone, texting or scrolling or checking email.

It is a fallacious assumption that interludes — periods of waiting for another part of our day to begin — are useless. For life consists in waiting. That fact does not need much establishing. What does need establishing, however, is that waiting, whether for a bus, graduation or a job, is good, or at least better than we tend to think.

When we are waiting for something, our thoughts are fixed on that which we wait for, but hardly ever on whether we are ready to receive it. We say we’re unhappy because we’ve been forced to wait longer than we expected for the thing we want most. But as Blaise Pascal once said, “Since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.” In other words, if you’re miserable in the waiting room, you’ll be miserable when your name is finally called. It’s not the waiting that’s the problem.

Waiting, then, is a necessity. If we allow them to, interludes prepare us to receive the main event with gratitude. We develop character, we mature, while we wait. This is not difficult to conceive. Boxers wait months before they fight so they can train and prepare. Teenagers must wait to drive. We all must wait four years to graduate. Employees wait to be hired. Parents wait to have children.

In a few words, there is no such thing as useless time. Waiting at the bus stop or for class to start are important times, and we must treat them as such.

What does this look like? It looks like the end of the mindless scroll, for starters, or the mindless binge. Making the most of our time is a cultural cliché, but there is something to living an active, engaged life rather than a passive one dedicated to passing large chunks of time away.

Sure, it’s a challenge to use our time wisely, but a good start, I think, is to reframe our perspective of our schedule, so that no time is intrinsically useless. What would you do if you thought those minutes at the bus stop were important? Or those few hours before class?

Change only happens when a person wants it to. So let’s keep asking ourselves these questions. It’s a good start.

Scott Stinson is a UF English senior. His column appears on Mondays.