Minimalism: Hacks for the modern student

This list will make your life in school/university a lot easier:

Replace your homework notebooks by plain papers!

Homework notebooks are quite expensive and a lot of space on the pages is left empty. Also they take up a lot of space in your bag and make it unnecessarily heavy.

Instead take a plain piece of paper and fold it 5 times in half, you end up with 64 spaces for noting down your to do’s!

Use pencils!

While you have to sharpen your pencil from time to time, they do not cause plastic waste and can not bleach over time. Also it is easy to erase mistakes. Much to the contrast of a fountain pen.

Plus they last a very long time.

Write small and use the backside!

This saves you a lot of paper and allows for easier access. It is much easier to keep yourself focused on one sheet of paper while learning instead of switching between pages.

Also try to use checked paper and try to write small enough, that you only fill out one checkfield per letter.

This technique allows you to only use a checked paper notepad, which also cuts costs and weight.

Only use a folder and a notepad!

Simplicity at its finest: Use one notepad where you get your empty pages from and put them into your folder. Make sure to get marker pages to show you the different subjects for easy and fast access.

You can still save on weight by putting empty pages directly into your binder and get rid of the rest of your notepad as well!

Get rid of your pencil bag!

Size down your pencil bag to the absolute minimum! In my case this left me with a calculator, two pencils, two coloured pencils, one set square and a 2in1 sharpener with an eraser attatched.

Put that stuff together with your homework paper into an easily accessible compartment of your bag (usually one of the smallest ones). 

Clean your bag!

Over time some trash will accumulate in your bag. Make sure to get rid of advertisements, old tests and love letters from your annoying classmate!

This helps finding stuff and reduces the weight of your bag by a lot!

Use your waiting times!

Sometimes you have to wait for the train or an hour gets dropped. Use this time while you are there and do your homework, learn or prepare the learning process by taking notes for later on learning. This is far more productive than playing cards or using your phone!

Create social media groups for your class!

This makes it much easier to share information and can create a better social environment!

Reminding each other on important subjects and helping each other helps a lot and having a nice chat with your classmates when not in school can improve social relationships with the other pupils.

BYOF -Bring your own food!

The advantages are clear:

-cheaper

-more choices

-canteen food is often of bad quality and expensive

-no stress for getting your food from the canteen or the next fast food restaurant

-the weight of your bag decreases with every meal consumed

Always get your water!

Drinking water is important to stay healthy and mentally fit during tests and such.

Try to keep just enough water with you to keep your daily needs covered. Usually you will need about 0.125 to 0.15 litres per hour.

You can also fill your water bottles in school if you do not want to carry too much weight around!

Liquid meals for important exams.

Do not waste time during important exams and solve your nutritional needs by using liquid meals.

Get a big calendar!

Get one of those big calendars where you see the whole year at once and mark the date for each test and exam. Put it on one of the walls in your home close to the table place where you are learning. This helps organize your learning process immensely.

Also it helps to keep other useful information there, just like birthdays and so on. As you are more or less forced to take a look at it everyday, you are able to identify conflicting dates and deadlines. Furthermore it helps to plan other things as well, such as holidays or when to start working for a certain project and so on.

Example of a nice calendar

Do not waste time with subjects that suck!

If possible, only put the minimal amount of work into the necessary evils. Better focus on important subjects which are important for passing or get you a headstart in life.

When it takes you 1 hour to pass an exam with a bad grade, why should you invest 10 hours for getting a perfect score if the subject is as unimportant as art?

Better invest your time in more important things!

Another strategy can be not to do your homework when you can allow for it!

The 80:20 rule also applies in school. 20% of your effort is responsible for 80% of the success.

Resource management is what makes a good pupil after all. If it takes you your whole free time to be the number one everywhere you did not gain anything. If you follow this path your life long, you probably will not live a happy life. Some things just need your time, like for example family.

Making choices and setting priorities is something you will gain from, your whole life!

Just a thought: Trump’s Twitter ban

In January 2021 Twitter took down the account of Donald J. Trump as a result of his many lies, which eventually turned into violence.

By not accepting the outcome of the voters will, he became somewhat of a firestarter for what culminated in the run on the capitol.

By shutting down social media accounts that encourage violent behaviour, those platforms want to remain an advertiser friendly environment. That is their business after all.

Understandably, as companies do not want to place their ads in a place which promotes acts of hatred and violence.

Yet extremist folks, such as Trump himself or various other political personalities complain, this would be an act of censorship.

First of all: Violating the terms of use, which clearly do not allow the promotion of violence, is a valid point to get kicked out of almost any place. This does not only apply to social media but also almost everywhere else. 

Second and more important, social media platforms  are businesses and as such , they decide what their platform looks like. They are allowed to do whatever the laws do not explicitly forbid. When they want to delete one's account, they surely will. Usually those platforms do not even need a good reason to do so.

Surely this becomes problematic when a lot of people use such an infrastructure to get their information but this is a problem of the people too much relying on things like Twitter and Co.

If you do not like this, then leave or stop complaining when someone finally pulls the plug on your social media account! Nobody forces you to use something like Facebook.

Such companies are no samaritans after all and have no obligation to provide their platform to you.

This is not censorship, it is business!

If people like Trump would have a clue on private companies, they would accept this and move on!

Lastly is the usage of social media always rather time intensive.

Many surveys conclude that people spend a lot of time there.

1 to 3 hours per day is quite normal these days (https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/average-daily-time-on-social-media#post-navigation-1).

Or in other words: If your president spends more time on Twitter than on his doing his job, he is doing it wrong anyways. 

Minimalism: Simplifying my daily consumption expenditures

The way, I manage my daily consumption expenditures is minimalism at its finest. With my guidelines I avoid spending any more money than needed and I save up all the calculating-in-your-head-while-shopping-idiocracy. 

Some of my strategies are unconventional, some are old but gold.

But most important of all: It’s easy:

1.Make a shopping list and stay a slave to it!

This eliminates the urge to buy something, that is price reduced but of which you don’t have any need for. A lot of people leave a lot of money in this field!

2.Stay healthy and eat clean!

Cooking for yourself saves a lot of money and often is very healthy as long as you buy mostly unprocessed food.

It’s almost impossible to mess up your diet this way, if you know at least some nutritional basics.

Potatoes, Rice, Oatmeal, whole grain bread, onions, apples, (soy-)milk, seeds, nuts etc. are usually not expensive and for most people quite healthy.

Combined with some fresh vegetables, tofu, meat and so on you are quite possibly on the right track.

The shopping list should only contain the stuff you really need, don’t even put sweets and such on the list or keep it to one item per purchase!

3.Don’t buy superfood!

Superfoods are pure PR, it’s overly expensive food to which regional alternatives for significantly lower prices are almost always available!

Not only are your "normal" alternatives at least as good, when it comes to nutritional value but often superfoods take a big journey until they are at your place, which is also bad for the environment!

4. Don’t rely on the big brands!

"No-name" products can be just as good as brand products! Oats of company X are often not better than their “noname” alternatives.

Also: who isn’t annoyed by advertisements and food scandals?

With this strategy you also don’t support monopolies which helps to create a more competitive and more diversified market and while big companies spend a good deal of their budget to annoying advertisement, the smaller, less known ones focus on the important stuff, which is their product and its quality!

5.Pay by card or phone!

This is very much in contrast to the general wisdom of paying only in cash. But the two steps above make sure, you don’t spend money on unnecessary stuff and only on the things you really need for a living. This frugality is what I need to live, so there can’t be a debate over whether I can afford it. I don’t pay too much attention to what the price is, since it’s crucial to my survival!

Every now and then I check my receipt checks, to see where I spend the most money on and then try to rearrange my shopping list accordingly.