When I graduated from college, five years and two degrees later, I entered the workforce. A temporary summer internship obtained through my Master’s thesis advisor turned into a full-time position and more than a year and half later I’ve found myself inexplicably and unexpectedly a cog in the nation’s corporate wheel. And while I’ve come to really like not being in school, it has honestly been the biggest adjustment I’ve ever had to make. Much bigger and harder than the adjustment required after leaving home and moving from California to Boston to attend college in the first place.
While moving across the country and starting college is often portrayed as the defining transition of a young life, what I’ve learned in retrospect is that school is still school. College was not so different from high school except that my parents were no longer a daily presence in my life — and the math was harder. In college your every move is scripted and choreographed, your every moment booked. Sure, you defined the context of your motions in picking your major and deciding which (if any) extra-curricular clubs or sports you will participate in. But after those few decision are made each semester, the next three months unfold largely beyond your own control. Assignments are due not when you decide to finally finish them, but rather when your professors decided they should be due.
College was an exercise in discovering how much Yes I could handle.
Yes, I can study for this test in 12 hours. Yes, I can write this essay in 7. Yes, I can write three sections of my thesis (amounting to some 40 pages) in less than a day. Yes, I will do these things even if I must drink so much tea that I make myself sick.
And, yes, today I still don’t think I have any regrets. College was a time of learning my boundaries, of measuring the length of my ability to stretch beyond the limits of my expectations.
But when I graduated I had to learn how to start saying No.
It was a tricky lesson because I had un-learned how to sit still and I had un-learned how to manage my time and I had learned how to fill my few free moments with hollow comforts (yes, I will watch that latest episode of White Collar now).
I needed to re-learn how to excise the habits from my life that were no longer serving me. I needed to re-learn how to say No to all the things that I had spent that last five years so happily saying Yes to. I needed to re-learn what it could mean to have free time.
I’d spent 5 years of my life being too-busy for the things that really mattered to me: for writing, for taking walks, for exercising, for cooking really good food. And because I was too-busy for the important things, the only things I felt I had time for were the really unimportant things: time for TV, and for surfing the internet, and an infinite array of other possible ways to kill 3 minutes here and 14 minutes there. Each of these activities helping to ease the resentment of having yet another assignment that I didn’t really want to do by providing the illusion of freedom.
I suffered from learned busyness.
The way out meant learning some hard lessons in saying No. And perhaps the worst thing was that I didn’t have to learn to say No to other people. It wasn’t like my life had become a dizzying array of commitments from which I desperately needed to disengage. Instead, I had fashioned a cage of my own making: a web of behaviors that helped me to forget how bored and alone and tired and empty I felt.
And learning to say No to myself, to break the chains of the time-wasting, soul-sucking habits I had so gleefully acquired during the years in which those same habits had felt like giddy misbehavior was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
In the past year I’ve finally managed to turn things around
I’ve given up a lot: I’ve said goodbye to pretty much every TV show I used to follow religiously, I’ve cancelled my Netflix account, I’ve drastically pared down the number of blogs in my RSS feed, and I’ve even starting doing my cooking all at once on Sundays to free up hours on weeknights.
These new-found hours were difficult to manage at first: I traded TV for online learning through EdX and then for online teleclasses, but with each trade I’ve moved one step closer to spending those hours on the things that really matter to me.
So that I can say today that I don’t think there’s all that much that’s still in need of pruning.
Today, I can say with absolute honesty that I’ve written each of the last six nights and I that fully intend to make that number seven.
I don’t remember the last time I managed that.
Confession: I’d actually been reading 
Up next on my reading list for the month was 
Last on my list for October is just about the nearest one can get to a modern day adventure story. 
I actually read most of this book in August, but didn’t manage to finish it in time for 
So it seems a gross omission that I had not previously read 
and most recently 
) and he had this to say about creating believable worlds that are outside of the realm of your own (or anyone’s) experience and I think it’s more than a little profound:
Here’s another entry from my I-can’t-believe-I-haven’t-already-read-this list. 