How many hours a day do you spend on your phone? What about your laptop or tablet? If you haven’t thought to check that number for a while, I encourage you to stop and check your screen time on your device of choice. Are you disappointed? Surprised? Horrified? For many of us, I suspect that number is sitting far higher than what we would like. And, sure, a portion of that could be attributed to time spent studying or working on some internship or the other, but what about the rest? I have a feeling I’m not alone when I say that hours of my day are spent scrolling through the bottomless rabbit hole of my feed.

There’s an economic concept I learnt at school that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently called “opportunity cost”. Investopedia defines opportunity cost as “the forgone benefit that would have been derived from an option other than the one that was chosen”. This essentially means that the true cost of any action or choice is the next best alternative you sacrifice in order to have it. For example, if you decide to hit the town for a night out with your friends, the opportunity cost of that action would not be the money spent on drinks and tickets and Ubers, but the time you could have spent studying for your assessment the next week. It’s a way of considering and evaluating the choices you make. What are you really giving up, when you pick one thing over another? 

It feels like I’ve been forced to make a lot of choices recently. Would it be better to do that pub crawl I’ve been excited about all week, or should I stay home to get ahead on my readings? Should I go to the gym, or let myself take a day off to recover from all the academic work I’ve been stressing over? Sometimes I even find myself wondering whether I should skip my current lecture to catch up on lectures from the week before. It feels impossible balancing my academic life with the endless list of everything else I want to do.  

I will admit that making these choices might be a little bit different for me, considering I switched to homeschooling for high school. It wasn’t until I got to university last year that I realised I’d become accustomed to slightly unconventional ways of managing my work-life balance. Deadlines and a set schedule and tutorials to attend in-person were and still are a bit of a foreign concept to me. The fact that I often have a million different things going on at once, completely outside my control, tends to take me by surprise. Homeschooling meant that my academics revolved around my life. If I had a party to go to or a movie I really wanted to watch, deadlines could move forward and back to make things happen. Here, if it just so happens that a friend’s birthday falls on the same weekend as a big assessment, tough luck. Something’s got to give. 

But there’s another aspect of my life that has changed since coming to university: I rejoined social media. There was little need for me to be on Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok as a homeschooler; I had a tight-knit circle of friends from my childhood and school days. Social media had very little part to play in that. More than a couple of years ago, realising that social media had little to offer besides consuming large parts of my day, I decided to delete every social media app off my phone. I had little intention of going back until the first day of O-Week, when a new acquaintance expressed hesitance at exchanging phone numbers. Why didn’t I have Instagram, the less personal, more relaxed way of keeping in touch? The awkwardness of the whole encounter made me open a new account as soon as I got home. The number of followers and following grew, alongside the number of hours I spent consuming content daily, with Instagram and TikTok adding themselves to the lengthy list of online media that draw my attention every day. 

And yet, I still find myself wondering why I have no time to do all the things I would like to—study, attend all my classes, go to the gym, spend time with my friends, finish a book. Speaking to my friends helped me realise I wasn’t alone in the struggle. Although everybody I spoke to felt that a good work-life balance was achievable, nobody appeared to have achieved it. We all found ourselves pointing to the same issue: procrastination.  

Research shows that internet usage and addiction is strongly linked to academic procrastination and can have detrimental effects on our mental wellbeing by disrupting our ability to maintain a satisfactory work-life balance. Learning to balance my academic work with all the other parts of my life is a skill I’m still working on. But it’s important to realise that every time I procrastinate and scroll through social media or binge TV, the price I pay is not my Netflix subscription or the overpriced phone data I’m using. The true opportunity cost is the time with my friends I’ll have to sacrifice a few days from now or the marks lost on an assignment that will bother me for days. So, I propose that next time you find yourself idle, scrolling through your social media or watching YouTube on autoplay, pause to think about what you’re sacrificing with your time. There is an opportunity cost to everything, so what are you giving up?