The Madness of Productivity
By Irene Koch
As March comes to a close, there’s a certain type of madness spreading throughout college campuses, and no, it doesn’t involve basketball. It’s the madness that involves throwing one’s hat in the ring for new leadership positions in student organizations, sending off internship applications left and right, saying a prayer to the Nova Schedule Builder gods that the one configuration that will let you take all 157 credits you need to take next semester pulls through, scrolling through the LinkedIn cacophony of “I’m so excited to announce I have accepted a position to continue my career journey at . . .” “Congratulations! What an achievement!”
It’s a rat race that infects us from the start of high school as faculty encourages us to get more involved to build “well-rounded resumes” and never seems to go away. Even if we tell ourselves we’re above the fray, seeing our friends and classmates flawlessly balancing 19 credits, serving as the president of six clubs, and snagging an internship at a Fortune 500 company can make us feel out of our depth. It gets to the point where the afternoons we spend watching movies or updating our Pinterest boards seem like afternoons wasted when we see how others have spent their days.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told someone, “Oh, I actually don’t have anything to do tonight,” and been met with their gawks and complaints about how late they’ll be in Falvey that night. Feelings of inadequacy bubble up, so we try to overbook ourselves the next week to stamp out that feeling. Insecurity transforms into one-upmanship, and suddenly, we’re humblebragging about how little sleep we got, overbooking ourselves to compete with others, and glorifying this ideal of productivity at the expense of our mental and physical health. It’s a toxic cage match leading to mutually assured destruction.
As this semester’s coursework and this recruiting season’s LinkedIn feeds ramp up, it’s important to remind yourself that your worth isn’t determined by what’s on your resume, and thus, you’re allowed to spend time doing things that won’t necessarily get you a job on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. Napping, reading books, going on walks around campus, and even hanging out with friends probably won’t get you into grad school, but that doesn’t mean these activities are any less valuable or worthy of your time. You’re even allowed to take a lighter course load or scale back your involvement in an organization to partake in one of these professionally insubstantial activities, especially if it’s something you’re truly passionate about.
This isn’t an indictment of the busybodies of Villanova who truly love and enjoy every bit of academics and campus involvement in their planners. I’m honestly amazed by all of you and admire all the passion and drive you bring to this campus. This is just an invitation to take a closer look at how we structure our time. If we have five extracurriculars but only three we’re really passionate about, and the other two we just do for resume space despite the extra stress they cause, we’re valid in quitting—yes, quitting—those activities. At the end of the day, we’re human beings whose inherent worth does not depend on the contents of our resume. We deserve to be happy, and if that means forgoing the madness of the rat race for leisure time—perhaps time spent watching the actual March Madness—then so be it.
