A com­mon phrase spo­ken by Ferris State University stu­dents is “I never have enough time.” For most col­lege stu­dents, after the assign­ment dead­lines and text­book read­ing, any spare time is spent rest­ing up for the next day’s rou­tine of rushing.

Though it appears either our days are get­ting shorter or our respon­si­bil­i­ties are over­whelm­ing, we can­not ignore the amount of time we spend con­sumed in the lives of others.

A study by the mea­sure­ment and infor­ma­tion com­pany Nielsen reported the aver­age user spent seven hours a month on Facebook. Experian Hitwise reported Twitter users vis­ited the social net­work­ing site 10 vis­its per month. A num­ber of col­lege stu­dents can con­fess to spend­ing even more time tweet­ing and Facebook stalking.

When con­sid­er­ing the time spent Skyping, chan­nel surf­ing and tex­ting, it appears the lack of time in our “busy” lives is only the con­se­quence of lifestyle dis­tracters we habit­u­ally incor­po­rate in our every­day schedule.

It’s almost become nec­es­sary that we remain logged in to some social net­work while at work or in class. The highest-viewed tele­vi­sion pro­grams tend to be real­ity shows focus­ing on the lives of celebri­ties and preg­nant teens.

I agree social media is a ben­e­fi­cial resource for build­ing and main­tain­ing friend­ships by stay­ing con­nected in the lives of oth­ers. However, our society’s increas­ing depen­dency on stay­ing inter­con­nected at all times has lim­ited the time within our lives we are allowed to per­son­ally develop.

Though we are con­stantly informed on the every­day expe­ri­ences of friends, we neglect to con­tribute to our own respon­si­bil­i­ties, goals and poten­tials. What if we used the reported 13 hours per week we spend watch­ing tele­vi­sion to learn an instru­ment or new lan­guage? The seven hours of social net­work­ing can be used to lose weight or orga­nize per­sonal finances.

Therefore, next time you think to your­self “I never have enough time,” reeval­u­ate the time you spend plugged into the lives of others.