In the following posts I’m going to share one of the most important non-academic truths I learned in college. But heads up: the following 3 paragraphs are boring introductory material.

When I transitioned from high school to college life, especially at a college far from home, it was big step forward in terms of personal responsibility. For most people in a socioeconomic state similar to mine, college is first the time we are held accountable to no one by default. Of course it can be wise to intentionally make yourself accountable to others, but that’s a topic for another day. I want to focus on something I learned from this newfound level of autonomy, specifically as it applies to how I manage my time.

I went to a college with a very “type A” student body. Social pressure generally pushed in the direction of achieving more with your time and efforts, as opposed to living stress-free and enjoying the present. This is nothing unusual for a college, and I’m not really advocating that it should be any different. I mention this only to help explain how, for someone like me who 1) has a variety of hobbies and refuses to let go of any of them, yet 2) is just as vulnerable as anyone else to indulging in wasteful activities, college presented a very real challenge in managing my time to my satisfaction. 

For my freshman self, there was working out, intramural sports, physics studies, group projects, jazz drumming, drumming in church, and then of course making friends and building relationships, enjoying my weekends, etc. And again, this is nothing unique. It’s perfectly normal for an overzealous freshman to sign up for everything that looks mildly interesting, only have unprecedented levels of stress come crashing down on them a few months down the road. Actually, I think it’s great that students have the opportunity to test these limits, fail, and adjust, all within a more controlled setting than the real world. It was in this environment that I learned to find the balance between wanting to be pursue success in all of my interests and not wanting to feel stressed out and anxious all the time. 

Okay, the boring part of the article is over. Success is about knowing where to fail. And I don’t mean that like the classic: “In order to be successful at something you have to try it, fail, and try again.” Everybody knows that already. 

What I mean is that to be more successful in one area, you have to be ok with failing more in another. At first this looks like I’m saying you can only follow one fulfilling passion, and you’ll need to neglect all the others in your life. But I’m not only talking about our more fulfilling activities like sports, studies, music, work, etc. I’m talking about everything we do. (What I call “more fulfilling” is a topic for another post, but hopefully you’ll see what I mean here).

The Easy Case

Let’s say I want to get better at playing drums, so I commit to spending more time practicing drums each week. That extra time has to come from somewhere; I have to choose something to “fail more” at. So I should ask myself: Out of everything I do throughout the day, in which area can I most tolerate failure? Laundry? Probably not. Food shopping and cooking? Probably not. But what if I happen to spend a significant amount of time watching tv or aimlessly browsing the internet? Well, that is fortunate for me, because now it is easy to see which things I should start “failing” at. Can I afford to be a failure at knowing what everyone on Facebook is up to? Can I afford to be a failure at binge-watching this Netflix show? Probably.

In this example, I guess all I’m really saying is “cut down on wasteful activities,” but framing every action on the same scale of success and failure has really helped me to do a better job of waste-managing. If I came home from classes and browsed Reddit for an hour every day, I might tell myself “It’s just what I like to do, and no one’s stopping me.” Instead, I could frame it as, “I spend an hour on Reddit every day, so I’m pretty successful at knowing what’s popular on Reddit… and being successful at that is important to me…? More important than being good at playing the drums?” Suddenly I see the situation in perspective, and this renews my motivation for the one task and my indifference toward the other.

Additionally, this puts a positive spin on the whole process of better allocating my time. Instead of lamenting, “I’m really losing my grip in these areas of my life,” and then feeling guilty about it, I can ask, “What am I succeeding at right now?” followed by “What would I rather be succeeding at?” Here’s the thing: No matter what you’re doing with your time, you’re always succeeding at something, it’s just a matter of choosing things that you value the most. Did you spend your whole weekend binge-watching a show? You’re successful at taking in the entire plot and characters of a large-scale story and relating to it in an enjoyable way, all in a relatively short amount of time. The issue is that the story is mostly irrelevant to your life and the pleasure will fade very quickly. For these reasons, it probably wouldn’t be hard to find an activity that you value more.  Again, the way that I personally measure and compare the values and pleasures I get from different activities is something I’ll cover in another post.

This seems like a good place to take a break, so I’m going to wrap up Part 1 here. In the next part I’ll write about the case where most of the waste has been eliminated from our lives and we have go about making some tougher decisions about how we spend our time.

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