honestly my number one piece of advice for students is to like. be pragmatic about studying. because lbr doing your headings in perfect calligraphy with a £5 brush pen isn’t going to improve your grades. re-writing and re-writing your notes until they’re instagram-worthy isn’t going to help you retain the information. planning in a £30 bullet journal which you’ll then feel pressured into making really aesthetic spreads for when a £5 planner would do the same job isn’t going to make you a better student. yes, 100% take pride in your notes and by all means treat yourself to nice stationery every now and again but pls don’t waste your time and money trying to reach some unattainable studyblr goals.
actually, writing and re-writing a thing is a really good way to help retain the information…
and making things pretty and aesthetic may not directly help your grades but it does make you more likely to keep going back and looking at what you’re supposed to be doing when it’s fun and pretty and a lot of people find that helps keep them on track a lot easier.like, don’t waste your time and money if it’s not actually helping you and you’re just doing it out of some weird peer pressure or whatever but also don’t shame the people doing it because they actually find all of this really helpful.
That’s interesting cause that’s not what I took from this post at all, and nor did I read it is attempting to shame people? (I mean it might be, I might be missing something.)
I saw it more as a “don’t let unhelpful ideals of perfectionism bog you down” because for so many people (myself included) making something Perfect becomes more of a priority than actually Doing The Thing, which is where it becomes unhelpful and more of a time sink than a productive learning method.
And a large part of being an unhealthy perfectionist is also telling yourself “if I only had xyz prop or thing, then this would be doable” when in actual fact the $5 journal works just as well as the $30, and the thing holding you back isn’t that you’re notes aren’t pretty, it’s that you’re fixating on superficial imperfections as a reason for why you cannot do something and progress to where you need to be.
I know for a fact I’m perfectly capable of rewriting the same sentence 60 different ways and not absorbing it at all because I’m trying to stop feeling like a colossal fuck up whenever my handwriting doesn’t look consistently neat. And I know I’m not the only one.
So yea, rewriting something over and over can help you memorize it, and as the post says, treating yourself to nice things is nice, as is taking pride in your work.
But also realizing hey, you don’t need to achieve absolute perfection to be good enough, is also very important.
So if you’re someone who is struggling with this, make your cheap ass journal pretty if it helps, take pride in what you do even if you smudge the ink. Treat yourself to that nice pen,
smudge the ink anyway. Use the stickers, stop saving them for a self imposed arbitrary moment of perfection that may never come. Allow yourself to progress. You’ll be a lot happier, and heck, you might finally learn your notes.