I’ve always been a harsh judge of time.

In my almost four years at Northwestern, that hasn’t changed. A packed schedule of club meetings, class assignments and reporting was built on a strict work ethic, classifying time either as productive or non-productive.

If I ate lunch and called my parents, that was definitionally a non-productive hour. If I didn’t check enough boxes off my to-do list on a random Tuesday, that was a non-productive day. Time was rarely constructive by this rubric.

This is a completely unsustainable mode of thinking, and one of the biggest causes of the persistent burnout we may feel when things get busy in our academic lives. 

As I work through my final quarter at NU, I’ve spoken with many close friends about this mode of thinking, this tendency to scrutinize time if it does not put a dent in their to-do list. It seems to resonate with many of them. 

This way of seeing things clearly came from somewhere.

Given NU’s status as an elite university and the work it takes to get here, it is easy to see college as an extremely high-stakes time. We may believe our short-term and long-term success in life lies in what we can do in just four years.

We must accomplish the letter grades we need to ensure we even have a fighting chance at the jobs or advanced educational opportunities we so badly want.

We search for the solutions to our productivity woes, to reduce the non-productive time we feel is in excess, with the belief that we CAN eventually get full control of our lives with the right strategy.  

Technology can play a big role here. We may use AI like ChatGPT to condense our work — to make it go quicker. But instead of just making our lives easier, it makes our lives faster.

Social theorist Hartmut Rosa called this phenomenon “social acceleration.”

If I was to read two 30-page academic articles for a social science class in one sitting, it would take roughly an hour and a half. If I were to use ChatGPT, I could produce two short summaries in seconds.

I’m guilty of using this shortcut. But the result is clearly not the same, even beyond the difference in time the options take. Reading those two articles means closely engaging with the ideas in a deep way, potentially leading to a shift in our thinking. Reading summaries off ChatGPT cannot do that. It follows that the former can energize our ability to engage with concepts, while the latter cannot.

But the loss of learning for the sake of learning may be treated as merely an unfortunate casualty. In a high-stress world where a good GPA can be the difference between getting into a dream law school or a good job out of college, we may feel pressured to disconnect from passion and prioritize efficiency.

If we constantly try to plan or structure our world around an unreasonable concept of productivity, we are more inclined to view it as unproductive if we don’t accomplish exactly everything we want and more.

In this process, we lose something foundational.

We lose the wonder and spontaneity that makes us human, the curiosity that first made us perk up in the classroom as youngsters.

We come to NU often expecting to have it all figured out after four years and view our time as a void to be filled with the means to get us there.  

But what about that activity you always wanted to try? 

What about that genre of literature you’ve always wanted to get into?

Those things should not wait until after graduation, and they shouldn’t even wait until you’ve finished that one political science essay. 

The solution to burnout is a redefinition of what makes our time productive. It requires a reclamation of what drives us and moves us as people. 

Calling my parents while eating lunch instead of working on something may not be productive to me as a student, but it is extremely productive for me as a human. Family connection can be such a boon for ensuring I stay anchored to the people that bring me stability.

Spending a day reading an unassigned book on a random topic of interest is not productive by my current rubric, but it is very productive if it feeds the very human desire for knowledge. 

This is not a call to abandon education or ambition, but an appeal to be kinder to ourselves and more cognizant of what we value on a daily basis. It means recognizing that we as human beings have needs beyond eating and sleeping. We need to learn, create, connect, disconnect, engage, revise and contemplate.

So, as you work to get a good grade on an exam or in a class, remember that you are more than a series of letters in a column, and even more so that a stressful monotony is not the only way to move through your college life. 

We are humans first, and students second. 

By redefining the way we see our very short time at this school and indeed on this Earth, we are not diverting our energy from what we really want, but protecting its sustainability down the road as we pursue our dreams. 

Raj Ghanekar is a Medill senior. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.