{"id":987,"date":"2021-09-28T16:32:28","date_gmt":"2021-09-28T11:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/?p=987"},"modified":"2023-06-04T09:06:00","modified_gmt":"2023-06-04T04:06:00","slug":"the-productivity-games-the-new-summer-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/2021\/09\/28\/the-productivity-games-the-new-summer-olympics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Productivity Games: The New Summer Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rida Arif<\/strong><\/p>\n

The words \u2018summer\u2019 and \u2018productivity\u2019 should<\/em> be oxymoronic, or at least they used to be when I didn\u2019t know what the word \u2018productive\u2019 meant.<\/p>\n

If you close your eyes and think of summer, do you imagine a fluorescently lit office, Excel sheets, and the burning blue light from a work computer? Seemingly, that\u2019s what our student body dreams of \u2014 a glowing resume is the ultimate oasis. At the end of my sophomore year, my aspirations for the next few blazing months were very simple: watch movies, go \u2018up North\u2019, and read. What I did not anticipate was the guilt that followed.<\/p>\n

I felt the achievements of my peers creeping up on me like goosebumps in the cold: sneaky and uncomfortable. Every refresh of my Twitter timeline birthed more tweets about new internships, interesting coworkers, and artists selling commissions. My email advertised pgslot<\/a> society department positions with elaborate application forms. Facebook posts offered 1.2 Rupees per word if I were to write 2000 words a day. There was no escaping the productivity brigade. We were all inadvertently competing with each other; who can do two internships at once, who earns the most money, who can bulk up their LinkedIn the most before the summer is over. It was practically unavoidable.<\/p>\n

After overestimating how much work she would have the motivation to do in the summer, Manaal Ahmed \u201822 dreaded going on social media after seeing people constantly post about their work: \u201cI would think, \u2018look at all these things people are doing, I am so behind\u2019… It is this feeling of \u2018being behind\u2019 that made me overcommit and caused the worst burnout.\u201d<\/p>\n

One would think that the idea of doing something productive with your summer would be standard for rising juniors and seniors, but even freshmen are plagued with this conundrum due to social media. Aaila Mujeeb \u201824 told The Post<\/em>: \u201cYou normally wouldn\u2019t know what everyone is doing, but because of posts and stories, you see what people are working on all the time and feel like you need to be doing something too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly, it is a double-edged sword: if you planned to relax, you are wasting your summer, and if you planned to work, you aren\u2019t doing enough. Aalia believes the LUMS community reinforces this belief. \u201cI think LDF has also played on situs idn poker<\/a> a part in all this pressure. You\u2019ll see more posts about internships and freelancing rather than seniors giving advice saying that it\u2019s okay to relax,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

After two months of being implicitly convinced that I should be working against my will and my own guilt-tripping, I wondered whether our generation even understood the importance of recharging. I came to the realization that we equate relaxing and rejuvenating with doing nothing, and that is why we make ourselves feel bad. We simply attach no value to relaxing.<\/p>\n

Kinza Ghanchi \u201823, a fellow no-summer-work advocate, echoed my sentiments, \u201cI feel like rest isn\u2019t even a concept anymore, and to live we need to be productive. Rest is considered a reward, not a right.\u201d This idea of consistently having to earn<\/em> the luxury to rest without the attached guilt is practically foreign to our age group to the point where we have even begun to assign productivity markers to our hobbies and interests.<\/p>\n

Manaal discusses this argument in terms of a blurring between the boundaries of work and leisure: \u201cWe want our time to be quantifiable. If I cannot break down what I did in a day into numbers, then I did nothing\u2026 This also applies to leisure activities. If I enjoy painting, I should be able to quantify the value of the painting through money or likes on social media [for it to be productive].\u201d<\/p>\n

This leads to a question I have been asking myself all summer: what is<\/em> productivity, and why must it be defined only with capitalistic goals in mind? Should not reading, painting, writing, and creating\u2014even for leisure\u2014be considered productive? Upon asking what productivity means to her, Kinza answered simply: \u201cMaking good use of your time,\u201d where you create the parameters rather than letting others define them for you.<\/p>\n

My argument here is not that working during the summer is inherently wrong\u2014if the prospect of working excites you or is necessary to sustain your way of living, that is respectable. However, if you feel propelled to overwork yourself due to the intangible but immensely powerful combination of not valuing relaxation, trigger-happy internship posters, and a skewed definition of productivity \u2014 I am right there with you.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the most productive solution presents itself as a healthy mixture of learning to view relaxing as a human right, muting certain people on social media, and learning not to boil your day down to numbers. May we all enter campus fully refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to compete for those sweet, sweet CP points once again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rida Arif The words \u2018summer\u2019 and \u2018productivity\u2019 should be oxymoronic, or at least they used to be when I didn\u2019t know what the word \u2018productive\u2019 meant. If you close your eyes and think of summer, do you imagine a fluorescently lit office, Excel sheets, and the burning blue light from a work computer? Seemingly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1153,"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions\/1153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailystudent.lums.edu.pk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}