I hate this time of year.

Sure, the fall colors are nice and there’s a musky smell in the air that’s found in all small, college towns, but, it’s the homework.

As the semester winds down, the stress picks up.

Sometimes you just need to slow down and take time for yourself. The Counseling Center and other departments, organizations and events try to help with this.

But if that’s still not enough, an article in Time magazine this week said Americans are taking another look on their own at event-packed schedules.

The article focuses more on what families can do to spend time with each other, but what one town says they’re doing can work for anyone.

Two years ago, the town of Ridgewood, N.J., set up one day annually that encourages people to take off work early and for organized events to be canceled. The town residents just stopped everything in the evening and decided it could be done the next day.

They called the initiative, “Ready, Set, Relax!”

“Years of multitasking and workaholism have left Americans across the economic and geographic spectrum feeling exhausted,” the article said, adding as of last August, 60 percent of Americans said they felt pressure to work too much.

Starting in the ’80s, the trend has been to work harder to compete as sociologists pushed for more structured activities and globalization became a greater issue.

What if Eastern had a “Ready, Set, Relax!” day where instructors were asked not to assign homework, athletic practices were canceled and students just spent time lounging around?

Even if most students already have extra time to relax, there’s nothing like a scheduled time to put your feet up.

Still, Ridgewood residents said it wasn’t always manageable to cut out work and activities early because that often left something that had to be made up later, but some said they would never had done it if the city hadn’t scheduled a time slot for them to catch their breath.

“We just couldn’t keep going and going and piling on more. We were missing out on life,” one resident said.

The article says 80 percent of men and 62 percent of women spend more than 40 hours a week on the job. Most students probably spend at least 40 combined hours between classes, homework and a job or other activity.

It might be unlikely all of Eastern will join together like Ridgewood, a town of 24,000 on the state’s north end. But, Charleston has almost the same population, along with the potential for easily stressed college students.

Try some meditation, read a book about puppies, take a bubble bath, put off homework for your favorite movie. Classes will start to be busier as finals draw nearer and presentations and papers are due before the end of the semester, so find a way to relax that works for you.

It might not be easy at first, but at least you won’t always be “missing out on life.”