The sun is shining, the brown leaves have finally made their way down to the abundant green grass and the palm trees on Palm Drive are as gorgeous as ever. Obviously, it’s time for winter break. Just a few minor exams and papers and you’ll be well on your way to three weeks of hard-earned, work-free bliss.

Call me psychic, but I’m willing to bet that I can predict what most of you will be doing over the holidays: namely, everything you’ve wanted to do for the past 10 weeks but haven’t. That would be sleep; spend time with friends and family; catch up on current events, Hollywood movies and missed television shows; answer personal email (or not) and, oh yeah, breathe.

Here at Stanford, we have a tendency to let the latter fall by the wayside in favor of the more important things — things like schoolwork, extracurricular activities and homework, with a few applications and standardized tests thrown in for good measure.

This phenomenon does not just thrive at Stanford, of course. It occurs in virtually any institutional microcosm of twentysomethings you can imagine (Harvard, Berkeley, McKinsey, Goldman, Google). The Deferred Life Plan exists the world over.

Back in the day, the DLP started around September of senior year of high-school, when people put off pajama parties and unaccredited extracurriculars in order to fill out those pesky forms known as college applications. “I’ll relax in January,” we figured. “Once these are out of my hands.”

Today, the DLP begins even earlier, with high-school freshmen forgoing frivolous activities like float building and movie nights in order to take SAT prep classes and perform community service. “When I get in to Yale, it will all be worth it,” they (or their parents) say.

But the dangerous part of the DLP is that, once you sign up, it’s incredibly hard to unregister. There is always another hurdle to prepare for, another unknown looming on the horizon. If you won’t attend Frosh Formal until you’ve figured out your major, won’t go to Pub Night until you’ve finished the next chapter of your thesis and won’t date until you’ve found a job for the next summer/year/decade, you’re going to be waiting a long time for Real Life to start.

Lest you operate under the illusion of future security, let me share a conversation overheard yesterday at the Graduate School of Business cafe (which, for the record, has the most attractive ... food ... on campus).

“I know it’s only December,” a girl said, “but I’m worried about what’s going to happen when I go back to my company in June. Once I get on that treadmill, it’s impossible to get off.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said her friend. “One of our top New York executives, who works from five a.m. to nine p.m. and has made 30 or 40 million dollars, told me that he always planned to go in to non-profit work after he made his first 10 — but now he can’t stop. His family is used to the lifestyle.”

Although I didn’t interrupt to ask, I would imagine said lifestyle involves a gorgeous brownstone on the Upper East Side, a horde of hired help and annual trips to Aspen, the Bahamas and the Hamptons (during the appropriate seasons, of course). I would also imagine that he brings his laptop on the plane, his Blackberry on the chairlift and his stress everywhere.

Finances aside, perhaps the most amazing piece of this story is that this millionaire has a family. His Y chromosome may have freed him from the inconvenient, time-consuming experience known as pregnancy, but when did he find the time to meet his wife? Match.com, eHarmony and their juvenile version, Facebook, may have made it easier to locate potential partners, but, aside from mail-order brides, there is no way to replace the intricate, tiresome process of dating.

As a hardworking, high-aiming overachiever myself, I write this all with the utmost sympathy. Indeed, until I ran head-long in to the most overwhelming 10 months of my life, I, too, was a firm (if subconscious) subscriber to the DLP.

When I started teaching ninth grade last August, I wanted to do the best job possible. Realizing that my time and energy were limited, I figured personal emails and phone calls could wait for the weekend. But the coming months taught me a handful of painful lessons in time- and energy-conservation. By the end of September, I learned not to go out on weeknights. By the end of October, Fridays were out, too. Saturdays and then even Sundays became time to sleep, run, read and generally recover from the past week — in order to wake up and do it all over again.

But one Sunday in February, as I packed my bag for the next day and felt the tension headache coming on, I realized that I was miserable. Yes, I was teaching five amazing classes and had won over a hundred teenagers, but the exhaustion and subsequent social isolation were hardly worth it. No matter how cool they are, your coworkers will never replace your friends and your magnificent final product will never love you back.

This year, with plenty of time to maintain friendships and even make a few new ones (as well as go on a few dates), I can see the DLP from the other side. The last guy I dated was a hardworking, former consultant at Bain (for those of you not yet initiated into Cardinal Recruiting, Bain might be considered the Stanford equivalent to McKinsey’s Harvard mentality — either way, you’re working 80 hours a week). Mr. Bain liked to call when he was in transit — from dinner to the gym, between one party and the next, en route to lunch with his co-workers, etcetera. The relationship ended when he called to see whether I would be his backup date to a concert in case his friend bailed on him — he needed to maximize his limited social time.

To paraphrase John Lennon, the tricky thing about Real Life is that it happens while you’re making other plans, and, to paraphrase myself, most people won’t wait. So, when annual resolution time arrives in a few weeks, consider just what — and who — you’re putting on the back burner right now. I guarantee that, if and when you chose to return to it, the work will still be there. Who knows — it might even look a little less important.

Lisa Mendelman ascribes to the “Avenue Q”-inspired “Everything in Life is Only for Now” Life Plan. Email her immediately at lisame@stanford.edu