You need to move beyond setting your life up around your classes, and, instead, set your classes around your life. The faster you can learn to see your day as 24-hours of time to pursue any and everything, the more joy you will find no matter what it is you are doing.
More generally: stop compartmentalizing what you do.
Picture it, you are walking across the stage, a feeling of unmatched success swelling up. You shake hands with your college's dean, then the president of the university, receive your diploma holder, exit stage right, take a picture in the halls of the stadium: after 18 years of knowing what to do when, where to be, when to eat, who to sit by, it's all gone.
Perhaps you have considered, “What's Next?”, but tonight, no tonight you revel in your shared success and joy with your classmates with a night out on the town. Waking up the next morning, with a questionable aftertaste lingering in your mouth, you grab your phone, sit up in bed, and ease into these early moments of new-found freedom. All your work is done.
You have accomplished it all. What's next?
Hopefully you have graduated with this question in mind, securing a degree in a field you are hoping to work in. Maybe you had an internship that lead to a full time position, or you will give a year in service to some larger cause. You might find yourself in the growing population of students who went to college and graduated with a degree of passion: you studied what you loved and now cannot find a way to translate that love, and debt, into a career.
Amidst the myriad of options for where you might be on the what's next spectrum, you are going to want to find something called work-life balance.
You will want to be in a polygamous union between work, socializing, and personal pursuits.
Possibly you will look for a job that makes this comingling easier: a company that uses the sleight of hand trick by throwing bean bag chairs, a relaxed dress code, and crazy benefits at you, a company that allows you to work remote, a company that has a four-day work week.
You may enter a job that demands a commitment to your duties, that even thinking of having a social life or hobbies is that soft form of cheating where you imagine yourself with someone else just to see if you want to stay where you are at or not.
Maybe, you end up being in the on again off again, will they won't they, relationship where you are all in one day, then distant and cold the next, only giving the bare minimum when you show up, so once you leave, you have the energy to do what it is you truly want.
Regardless of the relationship you find yourself in with your job, you are going to hope that you can segment the day the same way you have the last 8 some years since high school.
I go to school. I do this at school. I go home. I do this at home. I go out. I do this when I am out.
Get out of that mindset as soon as you can.
I understand the value of a routine, and you should have one: structuring your time is ultimately what you want to do, but you must force yourself to start looking at the 24-hours in a day, not the block schedule with an hour for socializing and a free period every so often.
You need to see the 24-hours you have as a sum total of time where you, yes, have a job, but that job does not dictate your schedule.
With high likelihood, graduating from college you will find yourself in a typical 9-5 or on some other more intensely demanding schedule.
Considering the standard 8-hour work day, with another 7–8 hours devoted to sleep, 1–2 hours for working out in some fashion, 1 hour to get ready in the morning, 1 total hour for commuting, 1 hour for daily tasks and chores, 1 hour to cook and eat dinner, you have on the high end, 4 hours of free time sometime in the evening after you have expended, most, if not all of your energy to sustain yourself in order to work.
Stop to consider no time is free: there is no such thing as free time. Everything comes with opportunity cost, and the free time you have is free in your choice not to do something else. It is more than likely your time will be devoted to sitting down and not doing anything as you are tired. You will throw on your preferred streamings service and try to drown whatever it is you put on, doing a proverbial keg stand on your social media platforms: siphoning as much content as you can before you can take no more.
You probably will start revenge bedtime procrastination in an effort to feel like you have some personal time in the day amidst all your responsibilities. This is real, look it up.
Until you understand that your day is not I work now, I rest now, I eat now, I see friends now, I follow this set schedule the commands me to give up 25% of my day in service of someone else but not in a charitably service way, until you grasp that concept, life will be miserable.
Spoilers. I know that first hand: I am a teacher and a coach.
For two years, our work started at 4 am and ended around 3:00 pm if we were lucky. After an 11-hour day, running on what little energy we had left, we tried to muster the strength to get to the gym, cook dinner, read, care for my body with yoga, call family, and get to bed before 8:00 pm. News flash: it didn't all happen: you never make the CrossFit Games.
At some point, we began to live to work. Our life was centered, fixated, revolved around our job. We woke up to work and we went to bed to work. There was no room for personal pursuits or at least no room to truly enjoy them. We were forcing leisure in so we could at least feel like we had life.
Trust me: stop compartmentalizing your life.
If you have not read, Work-Life Balance is A Myth, you should, because the ethos of that post is what I am leading into.
The reality is, many people do not have the luxury to quit a job and pursue a passion project: you included. No matter the “life” influencers have constructed and are portraying, we have to figure out a way to do what it is we want to do while we do what it is we have to do.
We do have to have jobs: a job is not a bad thing. Work is not a bad thing.
Yet, in the absence of work-life balance, you have to be willing to do what most others won't if you want to thrive and enjoy your life.
You have to be willing to answer an email at 8:30 pm on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night.
You have to be willing to trust your instinct and use your downtime to pursue your interests in some way.
You have to be willing to be willing to flow in and out of various tasks, not letting an unfinished idea or project deter you from jumping to the next.
You have to read many books at the same time.
You have to find the time to create.
You have to reach out to those around you to do things.
You have to be willing to take steps you see no one else taking.
Yes, you may find a job you want to do: we love teaching and coaching, however, we are not only a teacher and a coach. To allow ourself to only be defined by our job would leave us severely lacking in so many ways. We would feel tied to our job: we have felt this tethering. It leads to deep resentment: resentment of yourself and those around you.
We are a teacher and a coach, but we are a son, a brother, a grandson, a friend, a reader, a writer, a runner, a weightlifter, a CrossFiter, a cooker, and so much more we have yet to discover.
I am only beginning to scratch the surface of where this might lead for us, so please take this lesson to heart.
But that discovery does not happen if you keep our life segmented: doing x here, y here, and z here.
The longer you allow us to see our day as segmented parts, not one fluid, continuous weaving in and out of the roles we take on, you will find yourself prioritizing the wrong things: you will find yourself not feeding the other aspects of who you are: who we could be.
Unless you plan to graduate only to work a job, you have to be ready to answer the call of inspiration at any moment: this is why there is no work-life balance. The person you want to be, the person you want to grow into, will be beckoning at moments you may think are inopportune. An idea may strike you in the middle of a meeting, while you are leading a discussion, when you are talking to a co-worker. Unless you are willing to break from the idea that you work at a certain point, and you live at another point, you will watch these moments pass you by, day, after day, after day, until you are left hollowed out by the myriad of ideas that have come in and out of your mind.
If you only create, only read, only think, only write, only do whatever it is at a certain time because you work on the same schedule from school, where all you did was school for eight hours, straight, you will never be great at what you do or even do anything at all.
The things you invest in that are more than what you do for a living, those are what feed you in your other areas of life. Those are what allow you to come to work and actually find joy.
Investing and loving yourself for all the person you are and the person you want to be, even when it seems selfish or like it should happen at another time is how you can show up completely the person you are in other spaces. That's in essence The 432.47 night I Will Never Forget.
I should not have taken us to a sold out concert on a school night. I should not have had us stand in the rain for an hour, possibly to get sick, to spend a large sum of money to stand around with strangers to listen to another stranger make sounds we call singing. I should not have stopped to get Takis after the concert: I should have taken us home, got in bed, and tried to make up the lost time from the evening in preparation for the next day.
But we did it all.
Living for your job, living on the regimented school schedule, is a life doomed to fail. For a life lived in this way is not living at all: it is a mere existence. You are not an active participant in shaping, molding, and beholding who you are and are called to be. You are an empty shell, a body used by someone else for their ends: no matter how valiant the profession, this is the case.
It is in finding the things you enjoy and making sure you allow yourself the ability to make them happen, even if it means messing up your routine, it is in doing this that you will be able to find success elsewhere as now you are entering these spaces are who you truly are. You do not feel you are neglecting yourself and need to revenge procrastinate because of your responsibilities elsewhere.
Northwestern economist Joel Mokyr explains it all.
“Workers, who had always spent their working days in a domestic setting, had to be taught to follow orders, to respect the space and property rights of others, be punctual, docile, and sober. The early industrial capitalists spent a great deal of effort and time in the social conditioning of their labor force ... so as to make the workers more susceptible to the incentives that the factory needed” (The Rise and Fall of the Factory System).
The bell system implemented in early schools was not meant to be a helpful reminder of the time. The bell system was implemented to condition students to grow accustomed to a bell schedule in the factory jobs they were to eventually take. Schools were not set up for autonomous creators or thinkers, so why are you living on a schedule that looks to restrain who you could be?
Sincerely,
JBJ
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