By Greta Hallberg, Columnist
In high school, I was constantly reading a book. I brought novels to my music stand during band class to read when our director was working with another section of instruments. I would read whenever and wherever I had the chance.
I was constantly writing, too. I had an embarrassing blog that detailed the struggles of being 16 years old in an affluent suburb.
The topics might have been trivial and the books may have been teen-lit, but I was reading and writing for no other purpose than to please myself.
I can't remember the last time I've done either of those things in college. I read textbooks, assigned articles and the news, but I don't have the time to get lost in a novel or read autobiographies of women I admire. It isn't an exciting book that I'm sneaking in between classes, but it's responding to emails for Up magazine or reading news digests delivered to my inbox.
Everything I write is an assignment. Whether it's an academic essay, a journalistic story or my weekly columns, I'm meeting a deadline. That's not to say I don't enjoy it, because I do, but I don't have the time to write for the sake of writing.
In fairness, I didn't have an iPhone in high school. My family didn't have Netflix instant streaming and I wasn't nearly as invested in Snapchat, Instagram or the other apps that take up time and space in my life. Today, I have so many more distractions than I did when I was an active reader and writer in my spare time.
I'll own up to that. I play silly games like spider solitaire and watch Snapchat stories when I probably could be doing something productive.
My free time, it seems, is segmented into tiny fractions. Ten minutes walking to class, five minutes waiting for my food or a minute before class starts is hardly enough time to sink into a book or write a creative essay. My days are less like a full story and more like a series of unrelated sound bytes strung together.
The irony of writing this piece in chunks between running around all day is not lost on me. A paragraph typed on my iPhone here, a few sentences while pretending to take notes in class there. This piece-meal method is how I do most of my work nowadays. Until after dinner when I can sit down and focus on something for more than a few minutes at a time, I'm distracted by the constant buzz of my phone and the hundreds of tabs I have open on my computer.
I'm losing time by multitasking. My brain is constantly switching between apps on my phone, items on my to-do list and even subjects in school, and I have to refocus every time. I can acknowledge it, but why can't I stop? I can't be the only millennial whose phone burns white hot in their pocket, even when there aren't any new notifications.
When I graduate, I want to find a job as a journalist. I know I'll be working on deadline much of the time, pursuing stories, editing clips and writing on the fly. It's a fast-paced career path, and I know that. But journalism also requires creativity. The best stories aren't written overnight. They have multiple drafts, more than one interview, tons of research and, most importantly, time.
A good story involves a lot of reading and a lot of writing. I love both of these things, but to do both well, you need time. Time to build your focus, time for ideas to marinate, time to really get in the groove. I worry that, with the push-notification lifestyle I'm living now, I'm losing my ability to focus, and thus do the things I love and the skills needed for my future career.
I hope this is a product of college, where unstructured time, over-involvement and odd hours don't make it easy to cozy up with a good book. While my dad isn't a writer, he has the time to read biographies and historical novels after a day of work. Maybe it's because his phone isn't a third limb like it is for me, but I'm hoping that life after college lends itself more naturally to creativity and making time for yourself.
I don't know what the root cause of it is, and maybe I never will. Your 20s are a selfish time in your life, but so far I'm finding that most of the reading and writing I do isn't for myself. Maybe I'm wasting my time, maybe I'm a product of my generation and maybe I'm just spread too thin. But I sure am craving the time to sink into a good novel for no other reason than to read.