In line with my last article, I would like to suggest some ways to make use of the little breaks we get throughout the day. Whether the minutes between classes or the time spent waiting for a commute, these slots are difficult to fill with some satisfactory activity. Of course, there are many reasons why it might be difficult to use these times to benefit yourself as much as you can, but in my case, I found that the problem was a lack of clear, enumerated things I could pick up and drop quickly enough to make them worth those few minutes. Developing a list of such activities has helped me manage my time to have more extended periods of downtime later.
Diversify Your Entertainment
A major sink that has been eating up more and more of my time in the past few years is short-form social media, and that’s sometimes my go-to during these periods of downtime since it’s so easy to pick up and put down and it provides a break from thinking and working. However, it doesn’t feel great to realize how much time I spend scrolling and not receiving any benefits. How can I avoid the feeling of “doomscrolling” while still being entertained during a break? I have found that it helps to seek out different sources of entertainment, especially text-based ones and ones that feel somewhat productive to you so that my interaction with them doesn’t seem stale and wasteful. This discovery process is active rather than passive, and even better if the entertainment outlets you settle on are themselves more active than short-form content, too. Recently I’ve been using the microblogging platform Bluesky, which lends itself to smaller content circles and more activity in curating your own feed.
Meditate
If you find that entertainment isn’t necessary or helpful for your relaxation, simple meditation is also quick and easy and will bring you even more of the benefits associated with giving yourself a pause from work. This could be explicitly sitting down and practicing formal meditation if you’re in a safe space, or just zoning out or observing your surroundings. Meditation can give you some time to quiet down everythingon your mind so that you can organize and come to terms with them. It can also help reset your mood if you feel irritated or residually upset about something. Try to make yourself somewhat comfortable with your environment, like sitting down somewhere and drinking water, so that you can focus on actively taking care of your mind.
Draft Your Work
Finally, another thing that helped me was realizing that the drafting process can drastically speed up the work I need to do later. Whether I need to submit an essay, a program, or an article, I have found the final process of putting the assignment together much faster if I have spent time thinking about and drafting it during these short breaks. It feels daunting to work on things since I am pretty completion-oriented and have trouble starting and stopping things, but letting myself make messy drafts of a sentence here or there is enormously helpful and doesn’t feel like something I have to “complete” in those few minutes. This is where I’ve gotten the most time back, as the amount of time an assignment might take to finalize could be half what it is to write it from scratch.
Conclusion
Giving myself these conscious options has been great for reducing my stress, as I have longer blocks of free time later for things that actually require more time, whether it’s doing homework, relaxing, or hanging out with friends. If this method of making up specific options for yourself is helpful, hopefully, you can use these as a starting point and start to manage your time just a little better.