I recently had a conversation with one of my friends about how we’ve been super busy all day long the past few weeks but feel like we haven’t really even been accomplishing anything. We talked about how both of our schedules are super packed from 9am until the evening; but still once it hits the nighttime (9pm), we feel like we haven’t accomplished much, and we still have so much more to do. It doesn’t really make sense because we’d both be sitting in our own separate apartments, doing work all day without really leaving unless we’re getting Covid tested or grabbing food real quick. We’d attend our classes online, work on homework all day, prepare ourselves for co-op related things, and do stuff for clubs and e-boards we’re in all throughout the day with barely any distractions, but still have so much left to do at night.
We talked deeply about what might be the causes of having so much left to do at night. First, we thought it was just because we simply thought we had such an excessive amount of work to do. Although that’s largely a reason for the feeling we get, it’s not all. We realized that the main reason that we feel that we have nothing being accomplished even after having busy, and productive days all week, is more of a mental and emotional issue. It’s the fact that we keep comparing ourselves to what we see our peers accomplishing. Whether it be a new post on Linkedin about someone getting a new job at some top-ranking company or hearing that someone got a 100 on a quiz that we didn’t do as well on; it’s just a constant feeling that we aren’t accomplishing enough because we think that others are accomplishing more.
After realizing what the problem was, we talked about how we can fix it. And, the first step was done already, which was realizing that there was a problem in the first place and addressing it. I’m glad we were able to talk about how we were feeling and realize that we’re not alone early on. Next, we discussed how we can make ourselves feel more accomplished without comparing ourselves to everyone else we see. To do this, we decided that having completely packed days of pure work is not healthy and we barely even have time to realize what our accomplishments are; so, we need to take that time off. We need to block off times of our day where we can just have fun or relax, or just take our mind off all the work for a bit. These times of the day need to be dedicated to recognizing our accomplishments and rewarding ourselves.
