Tips to Make Life Easier
Whether you’re at home or out and about, there’s always a better way of doing things. Whether you’re interested in saving time, money, or energy, here are a few life hacks that will make your life a little easier
1. Declutter and Digitize
Do you have collections of business cards, semi-important documents, holiday cards, old mail, or other papers that pile up? Well, you don’t have to accept the clutter or sacrifice the information on those documents.
Just take a picture of the documents you want to keep, and throw it all away.
*But don’t do this with paper documents you need like your social security card, birth certificate, or tax documents.
2. Create a Medical ID Card
Create a small document, similar to a business card to keep in your wallet at all times. Include your emergency contact, allergies, blood type, medications, conditions, and other important medical information. It could help someone save your life one day—and it might give you some peace of mind.
3. Stop the Stink with Soap
Are you traveling with dirty laundry? Is your shoe closet starting to smell? Wherever you need a little scent boost, you can add a scented bar of soap to do the job.
If your shoes need a little more love, you can put some tea bags inside to absorb the odors. Another technique is to let them sit for a few days full of dry rice and baking soda. And some shoes can be thrown right in the washing machine!
4. Chill Drinks Fast with a Frozen Paper Towel
Whether you’ve just done some last-minute shopping for a party or forgot to put your favorite drink in the fridge, you can use this life hack to cool down some bottled beverages fast. Just wrap your drink in a wet paper towel and put it in the freezer. In 15 minutes, it’ll be ice-cold.
5. For Wine, Use Frozen Grapes
Have grapes that you might not finish before they turn? Freeze them! They make great ice cubes to chill wine—and they won’t water it down.
6. Use Toilet Paper Rolls to Organize
We’ve all experienced it. A box or drawer that never stays organized because the contents are too small. A cheap and straightforward solution to this issue is in your house right now—paper towel and toilet paper rolls can be reused as organizers for boxes or drawers.
If you need to, cut them to match the height of your container. Then, line them up to fill the entire box. This is especially useful for storing cords and avoiding unwanted tangles.
7. Creative Kitchen Storage
Cramped kitchen? Take advantage of all the space you have by adding a cutting board to one of your drawers. You can still store items in there, and the added layer gives you another surface when it starts getting overcrowded.
8. Save Big Boxes for Your Toddler
Kids love drawing on the walls. That might not fly inside the walls of your home, but it can when you place your toddler in the right cardboard box. Hand them some crayons to color and see their creativity emerge in a confined mess that you can easily clean up later.
9. Steam Your Microwave Before Cleaning
Once food is crusted onto the microwave, it gets harder and harder to wash away. Luckily, you can easily wipe out any old splashes or splatters once you’ve given your microwave a good steam. Just heat a cup of water until the food softens—the time will vary depending on your microwave.
10. Mark Tape Ends
Fiddling around with a roll of tape trying to find the end is a tedious and time-wasting task. To avoid running into this problem, mark your tape end when you’re done with it. You can do this by folding one of the corners down onto the sticky side. You can also mark it by adding a piece of paper to the sticky part.
11. Anti-Scratch Garage Walls
If you have a narrow garage, you know that it’s all too easy to scratch or dent your car doors—especially if you have kids. To protect your doors, you’ll need a few cheap pool noodles. Cut them in half longways with either scissors or a knife. Then, adhere them horizontally where your doors would hit. With these soft bumpers, you won’t have to worry anymore.
12. Hammer with Confidence
Hold a nail in place before you hammer it into the wall with a clothespin—not your fingers. Now, you can protect your fingers while knowing that your nail is exactly where you want it. Hanging décor doesn’t have to be dangerous.
13. Creative and Cheap Chip Clips
Clothespins are useful for more than nails—you can use them as a cheap alternative to chip clips. If they don’t match your aesthetic, you can paint them! And if you don’t have any clothespins, try this tip: you can use any pen with a clip as a chip clip substitute.
14. Charge Your Phone Faster
A large portion of your phone’s battery usage is devoted to maintaining or establishing a network connection. If you want to conserve energy or charge your phone faster, just put it on airplane mode. Remember this next time you travel!
15. Use Chips to Start a Campfire
For some, the most difficult of going camping is getting the fire started. There are expensive options out there to help, but some chips will do the job just fine. The oils and chemicals in processed chips make them more combustible than you would expect.
16. Hydrate with a Reminder Bottle
Staying hydrated is one of the best things you can do for your body. For some, it’s also one of the most difficult yet basic challenges in day-to-day life. To keep on track throughout the day, add measuring lines to a clear, reusable bottle. Mark each line with a time of day. Then, follow your written goals!
17. Sanitize your mask with an iron
We all know what 2020 brought us. We have to be wearing masks that are sometimes hard to get. We may re-use the same mask over and over again because of that. What I do to fix that is use a hot iron and run it over the mask for like 3 seconds and that should kill any bacteria that might be trapped in it.
Photos:
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