Ben Borgers

Work-Life Separation in College

February 14, 2022

Over the summer, with infinite ignorance and optimism, I laid out a guideline for myself: Iā€™d try to stick to doing work outside of my dorm room, like at the library, to maintain work-life balance. That way, my dorm room would be for fun things and sleeping (the ā€œlifeā€ part), not work.

Midway through my first year, that separation is nowhere to be found.

Itā€™s not really gone wrong the way I imagined though: I imagined a situation where I couldnā€™t focus on my assignments because I hadnā€™t properly marked out designated spots where I always did homework. I wanted to have specific spots that would put my brain into homework mode.

But in reality, I donā€™t seem to have a whole lot of trouble doing work. I havenā€™t really procrastinated very much. My work gets done on time, and I do it wherever I happen to be ā€” yes, at the library, but also in other buildings or in my dorm.

Not procrastinating very much is admittedly not a terrible problem to have. But I think that my tendency not to procrastinate comes from a place of anxiety, not a place of chill-ness.

The truth of my work-life separation at college is that there is none. We essentially ā€œsleep at the factoryā€ ā€” where you work is also where you live. Thereā€™s not much of a way to turn it off.

So my brain worries pretty much all day about the assignments I have left. I havenā€™t ended up with an inability to work, Iā€™ve somewhat ended up with an inability to life; and a resulting lack of balance.

This sort of stress over schoolwork has really always presented itself in me. It's what makes me a relatively good student, but itā€™s also what allows schoolwork to cause an undue amount of stress for me.

Perhaps this is an exclusively college-based problem, where work is measured in assignments rather than time. It feels like itā€™s truly in your hands to finish things, and thereā€™s not much of a safety net for when things go wrong (at least thatā€™s how it feels).

But I feel like itā€™s more likely that this is a me-based problem, and that thereā€™s something in me that finds unfinished work and deadlines stressful. Hopefully at some point Iā€™ll be able to stop seeing work as so extremely important and urgent all the time, and reclaim back some of the life part.

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