About seven minutes late, I walked into a nearly empty lecture hall. At least one-third of the room’s population was on stage, watching their club’s president click halfheartedly through a slideshow. As they — very originally — promised their club would help us make the most of our college career, I wondered how on earth adding to our already precariously balanced workloads could lead to success. If life were a giant game of Jenga, I would admire their strategy, however, I don’t think our goal is to cause towers of time commitments to crumble.

Becoming increasingly preoccupied with shackling free time to a post of productivity, our society has eliminated the comfort in being casually committed and replaced it with a shout to “step up.” It loudly suggests that without a schedule full of club meetings, intramural tennis matches and internships, we might all end up in our parents’ basements, fingers covered in Cheetos powder.

So, in order to make sure that we aren’t headed down that path, we join clubs, train for intramurals and apply for internships. We fill every second of our schedules with whatever we can justify participating in and sigh with relief, admiring all the extracurricular activities that stand between that dreaded basement door and us.

However, while this might lead to a very involved community, it does not mean our involvement is high quality. Modern college students are spread so thin that we can’t even find time to sleep and, as a result, our participation peters out until it is nearly nonexistent and entirely useless.

Because we can’t truly invest in any one thing, we are serving as lazy leaders and subpar team members. Therefore, when the most important factor in having a successful organization is effective teamwork, the organization’s quality plummets right along with our lack of appreciation for it.

Unfortunately, our sight has been pulled away from the real purpose of clubs and sports and jobs, but we can refocus it. Instead of focusing on glorifying ourselves and boosting our resumes, we can focus on helping our organizations be something great. It is aggravating to sit through meetings that don’t matter and to do work that exists just to fill time. However, we can provide those currently pointless tasks with a purpose.

Students’ first step should be to cut down our involvement to just the things we really care about. This allows us to be wholeheartedly committed to those things. When we place one of our organs, like our whole heart (metaphorically, of course), in something, it’s hard to be unengaged. In fact, we’ll find that our dedicated commitment to one thing is more valuable than having our hands in 12 different pots, so to say.

Next, we need to make sure we are focused on the success of the team, not on our own success. That will lead to a greater emphasis of principles like cooperation, compromise and creativity. When there is a team working toward the same glorious goal of greatness, they find a way to get there, regardless of their own personal obstacles. Compromises are settled speedily and cooperation is the cornerstone.

On top of that, creativity flows more readily because of increased communication between team members and the comfort in knowing critiques will turn a brainstorm into brilliance. However, we must make sure not to foster an environment that provides platitudes freely and passes out pats on the back for participation. While encouragement and incentives are vital, empty encouragement is worse than strict scrutiny.

Conscious Magazine’s Edwin Henry reminded me the other day of this principle’s importance. This new magazine has been targeting topics they hope will set a fire in the hearts of their readers, or “Conversation Starters.” And, in Henry’s column about the detriments of empty and unconditional praise, I realized this could be the biggest stumbling block our organizations encounter.

Because we are so concerned with protecting the individual, we forgot to acknowledge how it is affecting the team’s purpose. As an organization, we need to put aside our personal pride and focus on promoting the mission of the team.

Being involved is not for our own benefit, but for whatever our involvement exists to benefit. Therefore, we must choose wisely how we spend our time. Instead of being concerned where we spend it, let’s be concerned with what we’ve accomplished, as a team, after it’s all been spent.