Hold a full backpack with your hands close to your chest, then with arms fully extended away. It feels heavier, right?

Although gravity is the same regardless of where you hold it1, the rotational force (torque) increases with distance from the pivot point (your shoulders), dragging your arms down towards your sides.

This principle applies while normally wearing the bag, which is good because it means you can make your bag feel lighter2 just by moving things around.

Easy Mode

Good news, you can probably get 10-15% perceived reduction. Most people don’t bother thinking about this, because they don’t carry enough for it to matter. Won’t save you from a stack of textbooks, but it’s a noticeable improvement.

If you really need an entire bag’s worth of items for camera equipment or the like, I can’t help you much. For the average commuter or student though, you have plenty of free space, which means there’s room to play.

It’s not complicated, just...

Keep things close to your back

Standard backpacking3 guidelines are heavy items in the middle along your back so the bag doesn’t feel bottom or top heavy and minimizes torque, lighter items around them to keep them in place distributed based on usage (higher usage at the top for easier access, etc).

Backpackers are working with stuffed bags where everything keeps itself in place though, so all that matters for them is arrangement.

For partially empty bags, this implies two other guidelines.

1. It’s good to have things which stay in place so they can’t move away from your back.
2. It’s good to have flat things because the far side of thick things will be away from your back.

Pockets are good because they keep things in place, organizers are good because they can make things stay flat, etc.

The ideal placement is to have everything raised up in pockets where they can’t move, as flat as possible against your back. More good news, most backpacks already optimize for keeping heavy flat things in place next to your back, in...

The Laptop Sleeve

This might be in the main compartment or in a slim back compartment. Either way, it’s the closest to your back.

Ideal for keeping laptops, the heaviest and tallest item most people carry, perfectly flat against your back.

If your laptop is thinner than the pocket, you can fit in any other flat items like a book. Don’t overdo it though, since the pocket is flat it’s easy to overstuff it and make it dig into your back. Lots of backpacks also have a smaller tablet sleeve attached to the laptop sleeve for this specific purpose, so make good use of it.

Even better, if your laptop sleeve is in it’s own compartment just cram in as much as you can without making a mess. The limited space will keep everything in place, and it doesn’t have the size limitation of most other pockets.

Might take some adjusting to find and get used to the right positions for everything in a small compartment, but it’s much nicer than rooting around in...

The Main Compartment

The main compartment pile is the worst offender for most people. For backpackers, this is a necessary evil since the bag is already full to bursting, but we can do better.

It’s actually better to keep large heavy items in the bottom, not the middle. Normal backpacks aren’t as tall as hiking backpacks so being bottom heavy isn’t a concern4, and without a full bag it’s difficult to keep things in place in the middle.

Anything in the pile will squash down and spread out because of gravity, and the only direction to spread is away from your back. If the heaviest item is already on the bottom, that’s less of an issue.

Still, anything you can do to decrease the pile is ideal. This could be simply carrying less stuff, moving things into the laptop compartment, using internal pockets (if your bag has any), using some form of pouch/organizer, or stacking items such that they cannot fall down.

The Front Compartment

This might be one small pocket tacked on the front of the bag, or a full compartment with a suite of pockets. If there’s organization pockets use them, otherwise avoid the compartment entirely.

The front pocket is the farthest away from your back, so it will naturally pull away and increase perceived weight, especially if you’ve redone your main compartment so the pile no longer fills the full width of the bag.

Any small organization pockets are great for keeping things out of the main compartment pile, just be careful about weight. A small charging brick or notebook is fine, but a laptop charger or large pencil case is probably better in the main compartment.

This includes side pockets, top quick access pockets, and any other oddities your particular backpack has.

Really up to you, I keep mine empty since I don’t need them and it’s easier to keep track of everything.

Notable exception for water bottles, which are awkwardly shaped and benefit from quick access. As long as they don’t tip over and unbalance the bag, it’s fine. Best you can do about the weight is to avoid filling it when you don’t need the water (e.g. you probably don’t need to fill it right before going home).

Other Tips

• Purge your stuff. Most people carry more paper than they need, and everyone’s got some old garbage somewhere.
• Clean the bag. Whether that’s a 30 second wipedown or a dunk in the tub, clean things feel fresher and lighter. Also, it’ll be clean.
• Practical experience trumps theory. If the choice is between weight distribution and comfort, prioritize comfort. Lighter bags are good primarily because they are more comfortable, it’s not an end in itself. Same with ease of access.
• Get slim storage pouches for wonky items like laptop chargers. A good one is negligible weight and limits how wide items can spread, keeping it closer to your back.
• Get a smaller/thinner bag. Same principle, larger scale.
• Get a simpler bag. Big padded straps for a light commuter backpack will make the bag feel cumbersome instead of comfortable, and pockets which don’t work with your setup are just wasted space.
• Sew in internal pockets. Sewing in an extra square of fabric isn’t hard, and it doesn’t need to be fancy or neat. Backpack materials and internal layers with padding can be tricky to sew into though, you might want to learn a basic stitch through normal clothes pockets or simple repairs first.
• Feeling extra? Take out an inch of width in the main compartment. It’s a difficult alteration but if you have a nice bag which just has a little too much space, it can make quite a difference.
• Don’t just pop the bag on and off when rebalancing. Shake it around a few times, jump around, jog down the hall. You don’t want an arrangement which is perfectly slimmed down at home but collapses into a wide pile on a shaky bus ride.
• Don’t lock yourself into a single setup. When you’re out and about, take a quick mental note of how it feels when you put it on and take it off, if anything moves around or is too hard to access. It only takes a few seconds to swap the contents of two pockets, and you can change it back just as easily.

May your back be less pained,

• Rew

Nightly Notes

Alright, day 2 down! If you came for the backpack advice, you can go now. This section is for meta updates, day of commentary, really anything that isn’t on topic.

Debated including it at all since I want these posts to be reasonably evergreen. However, they are fundamentally shaped by the fact that I’ve tied myself to a daily release schedule, and I think there’s some benefit to writing about process too.

Writing went well today, although I wonder if it makes sense to use such an authoritative tone. I’m no expert, but this is the style I seem to naturally write advice in.

Something to play with another day.

I’ve got a lot of ideas bouncing around, a month’s worth at least. Maybe three. This feels doable.

Happy Friday,

• Rew

---

Technically gravity changes because the Earth isn’t a sphere and height matters, but it’s negligible compared to torque. ↩ 1.

It is actually lighter in the sense of reduced force (our perception of weight is just the force of gravity), but not in the sense of reducing mass/weight. ↩ 1.

As in hiking. ↩ 1.

On the other hand, making an everyday backpack top heavy is an achievement, and if you managed that unintentionally I don’t think I can help you. ↩