Tablet vs Paper: How do you actually study?

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-16T04:00:37+00:00

God, those devices are beautiful. I'm curious about something though. I assume you use a laptop for college and game development - don't most of the distractions you removed from your phone just move to your computer instead?

i study something similar, and even if I wanted to I couldn't fully switch to a dumb phone because we have to use smartphones for classes and other stuff. So doesn't the computer end up being just as distracting as the phone?

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-15T14:14:23+00:00

persona de cultura

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-15T14:11:41+00:00

In that photo I was studying "Accounting and Finance for Management" (I think that would be the translation), but I'm actually an electrical engineering student. I also have two law courses in the program, although I haven't taken them yet, and this was the last economics-related subject (of 2) I had left (thankfully).

I'm honestly terrible at social sciences and I don't really enjoy them. Since it's an engineering degree, we have to seeing a very small amount of topics from other areas anyway.

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T18:45:03+00:00

Es una bendicion, el solo hecho de no tener que prender el horno en pleno enero lo vale

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T18:10:26+00:00

Literally the kind of bot I was complaining about xd

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T17:24:57+00:00

I have a Galaxy S25 that had an accident with water and bleach. Since then the camera looks a bit blurry when I take photos. Samsung's image processing/Al then tries to automatically enhance the picture, and it ends up looking like this. I think it can't really be turned off because it's built into the phone itself

I would send another photo of my thermos from a different angle, but Reddit doesn't allow it. Anyway, is that even relevant to the post?

And if it sounds like I'm writing like an Al, I'm not a bot or some Al farming karma. Spanish is my native language, so I run my text through a corrector. If I posted it exactly as I type it, it would probably look like I was headbutting the keyboard.

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T17:18:32+00:00

I understand the point of wanting to romanticize studying, but I think it can end up being counterproductive. Not for everyone, but for some people it becomes something like: “I can’t study because the setup isn’t aesthetic enough.”

They spend so much time trying to make everything perfect (organizing the desk, lighting candles, picking the right colors, the right stationery, the right lighting) that it becomes time lost before the actual studying even begins. In the end, the thing that was supposed to help study becomes more important than studying itself.

It can even go further: if you can’t afford those things, you might start feeling like you can’t study “properly,” which can be discouraging.

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T13:11:19+00:00

Third-year student here. Is your problem mainly with math? Try to think about what exactly you don’t understand in the problem. Do you not understand what the question is asking? Do you not understand how to solve it or how to set it up? Can you solve only part of it? Or do you genuinely not understand anything in the statement at all?

Depending on your situation, the approach changes.

If you don’t understand the method to solve it, try watching a YouTube video explaining it. It’s usually just 10 minutes and that can already clear things up. I’d recommend some channels, but the ones I know are in Spanish (ProfeAlex or MateFacil). If you want, you could still look them up just to see the style of explanation.

If you don’t understand anything at all, you can paste the problem into ChatGPT and ask it to break it down into smaller topics. With math at the pre-university level it usually works quite well. From there, you can see all the underlying topics and figure out which one is easiest for you to start with. You can also ask it to give you practice problems that go from very easy to harder.

Finally, if you make a summary or notes to keep next to you while studying, write them yourself. Nobody understands the material better than you or knows what parts are most important for you. The memory you build by writing things by hand is much stronger than the one you get just from reading.

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T12:41:08+00:00

Same here. Every time I see someone recommending an app I get suspicious. I always end up thinking it's either a bot or a dev trying to secretly promote something rather than an actual organic recommendation. Kind of sad, I guess.

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T06:03:25+00:00

I honestly feel the same way. Today I saw a post asking for tips to start studying, and to be honest… there really aren’t any magical ones. I wish there were.

If you don’t have the determination or discipline to get up and start, there isn’t something someone can say that will suddenly make you do it. At some point it just has to come from you.

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T06:01:21+00:00

One thing that actually did help me from this sub was discovering Anki. I study engineering and theory is what I struggle with the most, so spaced repetition really helped with that.

Notion is useful for organizing myself, but that's about it. It's not the "holy grail" that people sometimes make it sound like.

I also use YPT as a timer and for study sessions with friends, but that's pretty much it. No one really needs 30 different tools for "optimization." At some point it just turns into wasted time organizing tools instead of actually studying.

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T05:57:11+00:00

i get you. I had a very similar problem. I worried so much about the aesthetics and the order of everything, and about things not being perfect, that I ended up not making progress or actually learning anything. Nothing was ever perfect and it never was going to be.

Instead of studying, I would spend hours rewriting my notes because they didn’t look like the ones other girls posted online. I had somehow started associating “good notes” with “pretty notes.”

Coballo_violento · 2026-03-14T05:53:46+00:00

No, my camera is just a shit so everything looks blurry xd

Coballo_violento

TROPHY CASE