A Premonition

So, I assumed I'd never have a blog of any sort because people wouldn't want to read about my stupid shit. This is essentially correct, which is why this one has a functional rather than personal focus.

For the most part, the posts to follow will be about how to become a better student, or at least how to perform better. All of the advice I've seen for students has been "work harder and don't procrastinate," which is a bunch of bullshit. I'm a student, and anyone who's ever been a student knows that a strategy like that is just suggesting an increase in effective output at the expense of leisure activities, which isn't a desirable result.

All students have already reached an equilibrium between how important their grades are and how important their leisure time is. A student's work output is a result of this relationship, not a result of staggering ignorance. Everyone knows that more work can be achieved with more time, they just don't care.

The real solution, then, is to increase output by improving efficiency. I've unwittingly been doing this my entire life as a result of extreme intellectual laziness. I didn't want to spend as much time doing shit, so I expended more effort on figuring out better ways to learn shit, so I wouldn't have to do as much shit to learn the same amount. People often mistook this for intelligence. The truth is, I'm really not much smarter than anyone else around; I just spent more of my time learning about learning than I did learning about whatever it was we were supposed to be learning.

This blog is the next step in the process. I've sort of been stagnating efficiency-wise since I got to university, and I need to pick it up again. I'm trying to graduate with first-class honours standing, and right now it seems like I'm barely managing that goal. I figure I could be doing less work and getting better grades if I put my mind to it, so I decided to take some new initiatives in efficiency this summer, then write everything down in a sort of reference guide to remind myself about it. Doing it in blog form makes it easily accessible, and has the side benefit of allowing other people to read it if they so desire.

Anyway, that's probably enough babbling. All of the useful shit will follow.