Don't Over Do It.

Alisa M. Monheim
Mar 23, 2015
3 min read

Today, I am here to talk to the ambitious students. You are the perfectionists, the go-getters, and the leaders. You are the ones with leadership positions, internships, jobs, or extracurricular activities (or all of the above). You have so much to do! So much to accomplish! And I have something important to tell you:

Take a break.

The importance of taking a break cannot be overstated, and there are many reasons it’s important. There are the usual platitudes adults like to throw around about “only being young once” and “enjoying life,” and those are true too, but there is another reason that most of us forget: if you want to do well, you need to be well. What does that mean? There are only so many hours in a day. If you over commit yourself, the quality of your work may suffer - not only because you simply lack the time to do your work well, but also because it is not good for your brain. If you are stressed and exhausted, your brain is not working at maximum capacity. You’re not doing your best.

"...if you want to do well, you need to be well."

Over commitment is one of the easiest traps for an ambitious student to fall into, and avoiding it is easier said than done. Being a chronic overachiever myself, it’s a trap I’m more than familiar with. I didn’t really figure out how important taking care of myself was to my academic performance until my first semester of graduate school when I decided that working a full time job, a part time job, and taking a full course load was a good idea (spoiler alert: it was not a good idea). I did manage to finish up the semester with a (respectable) 3.8 GPA, but it wasn’t a sustainable lifestyle. I’ve also discovered that because I was so preoccupied with getting everything done that first semester that I actually retained very little of what I learned, which means now I have to spend more time on review as I advance to courses that build on those concepts.

But over commitment isn’t just a problem reserved for 20 something year old graduate students - it’s also a problem experienced by a lot of younger students, particularly high school juniors and seniors who are preparing for college applications. How is it that we keep biting off more than we can chew? It’s not always on purpose. Based on my experience both as a student and an educator, it’s because we fail to consider how much time a commitment will actually require before we take it on. Going back to my first semester of graduate school: I planned my time around my understanding of undergraduate courses instead of stopping to consider that graduate courses would probably be a much bigger time commitment. I also saw this with students when I was teaching SAT prep courses. My students knew they had to meet with tutors twice a week for math and verbal sessions but failed to account for the fact that to actually absorb the concepts they were learning in those sessions, they needed more time each week for review, study, and practice.

So what do we do about this? To avoid over commitment, try to learn more about an activity and what will be expected of you before you commit to it. And remember to give yourself a break! Even if you have a crazy week, give yourself an hour somewhere to decompress and recharge your batteries. It will help you focus better, retain more information, and improve both the quality of your work and your life. Remember: to do well, you have to be well.

Alisa M. Monheim grew up in the Santa Clarita Valley. She graduated from University of California, Los Angeles with a B.A. in English focusing in Creative Writing. She has worked in multiple aspects of education, including teaching, curriculum development, and after school program management. She currently works as a library assistant at a special collections research library and is earning her Master’s Degree* in Information Organization and Information Architecture from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. When Allee is not working, studying, or researching and preparing to take over the world, she enjoys reading, video games, theater, and being totally punk rock.

*Yes, being a librarian does actually require a master’s degree.