my school study system
It's back-to-school month (unfortunately), and this year, I've decided to give up on binders. They've never worked for me. Every year I tried to use them for the first week before I just give up and jam papers in the free space between them like a folder. This worked, I guess, but it wasn't great (it was awful actually). It took forever to find papers and if I forgot about them for too long, they turned into a compacted slab at the bottom of my backpack getting coated in graphite. Not to mention how annoyingly large and loud they are—they barely fit on a desk.
Towards the end of the last school year, I faced the truth. I was never actually going to use those dumbass binders. I took them out and ended up just storing my papers in notebooks. No pockets, just placed between the cover and the first page. Immediately, I had so much more space in my backpack, so I grabbed what is essentially the same as my existing backpack, just in a smaller size, and transferred everything over. I also took all of the paper that I didn't need—which was a shocking amount—and placed it in a stack of six manila folders.
This system worked better than before. Most of my papers weren't floating around in the empty space in my backpack anymore. Now they were taking up space in notebooks that weren't designed to hold loose paper at all. My backpack, however, was multiple pounds lighter. This wasn't just from getting rid of the binders but also getting rid of paper that I would never have a use for (like graded assignments), and if I really needed them, it could probably wait a day. Either way, that paper would still be taking up weight in my backpack, just organized into a binder instead.
Notebooks aren't the perfect solution either, because I have issues with them too. The main problem is that they can't be rearranged well. Every time I miss a day of school, I end up catching up on notes later, but I still need a place to keep up so I don't get any further behind. So, I flip my notebook to the back and start filling up that section, telling myself I'll copy it over tomorrow, again and again. It's not that hard to guess what happens; it never gets copied over and my notebook is just backwards for half of my notes.
So, I started looking for solutions. The first one I saw was Japanese binders. They solve some of the problems with American binders. They're lighter because of their mostly plastic construction, and many of them had unique clasp designs that reduced pinching or noise. There were a few glaring issues, with the main one being that they use a different pattern for hole punches, much closer to a spiral-bound notebook than a binder. To store all of my paper, I would have to buy a special hole punch. They also don't solve the problem of taking up a bunch of space either. Japanese binders wouldn't be the solution.
I then looked to combining rearrangeable notebooks for notes and folders for handouts. There isn't much of a difference between the notebooks and the binders, except that they are smaller and usually have a spiral binding, so they only take up the size of one sheet of paper on the desk. The biggest issue is that these notebooks were usually small and expensive for what you got. The binding also isn't the most durable and could come apart in a backpack. That left rearrangeable notebooks off of the table too. Small folders also wouldn't be able to hold all of the paper I would need.
Then, while browsing stationery websites online, I built a system that felt like it could work. The heart is a memo pad + holder for notetaking and storing assignments I was actively working on in my classes. It has 5 pockets (I have 6 classes), but that isn't a big deal because there's always one class that doesn't have too much paper to work with. Then, when I no longer need a paper constantly, it gets moved over to the expanding file folder with 6 tabs (enough for each class) that stays in my backpack most of the time. This is where I keep most papers that I don't need with me always, but still good to have. Anything that I know I won't need at all stays at home in a set of manila folders.
This ticks all of my boxes. It's lightweight, efficient, and organized. I never have to keep everything at my desk; only the paper I need stays with me. The flexibility of the expanding file folder is one of the main reasons I love this system so much. I'm a programmer at heart, so a hierarchical file system like on a computer is the most logical way of organizing everything to me. The expanding file folder can't fit a plain manila-style folder, but they're fairly easy to cut down to size—the main issue is just the tabs, which wouldn't really be needed anyway. Manila folders are somewhat ugly, so I found a set of much cuter file folders I had lying around and cut them to size.
Sure, this is needlessly complicated for just storing papers, but it is really the only thing I will actually use and stay organized with.
holy yap
if you wanted to know what items i specifically used, you can find them on this list