10 Smart Life Hacks You Probably Don’t Know

The internet is a wonderful tool because it’s brought together the greatest collection of human knowledge ever known. Some of that knowledge includes some great life hacks that can make your everyday life easier and make you more productive while exerting less effort. These are 10 of the best of those life hacks that you may not know.

10. Coloring Box for Kids

One great idea that will keep kids busy for hours is to give them a cardboard box to color on. Besides keeping the kids busy, it is a great way to recycle a box and you can save some money on coloring books. It will also give your children a creative way to express their artistic sides without them vandalizing your walls with their precious graffiti. Also, if the box is big enough, you don’t even need a babysitter. You could just plop them down inside a box and start binge watching some Netflix.

We’re kidding, of course! Please do not put your children in boxes so you can watch Making a Murderer. Instead, watch it with them so they don’t feel out of touch at parties, and so they’ll learn from a young age that they should always ask for a lawyer when talking to the police.

9. Paper Cuts

If you’ve never had one, getting a paper cut doesn’t sound too bad. After all, it’s just a little nick caused by a lousy piece of paper. But if you’ve had one, you know that they can sting so bad that even the Cenobites from Hellraiser, who seek out time and space to experience pain, would complain about how much they hurt. The reason paper cuts sting like that is because your hands are jam packed with nerve fibers called nociceptors, making your hands one of the most sensitive parts of your body. Another reason is that paper cuts are shallow and generally don’t bleed, which means there is no blood clot so the nerves are exposed to air, which causes more pain.

Finally, since paper cuts are usually on your hands and fingers, the wounds take longer to heal because of how much you use your hands so your skin keeps moving, making it harder for the edges of the cut to heal. If you find yourself with a paper cut, grab a ChapStick, or another type of lip balm, and rub it on the cut. It will help soothe the pain of the cut and it helps the cut heal faster.

8. Hiccups

Did you know that the record for the longest hiccup attack is a mind-boggling 68 years? That’s right, Charles Osborne started hiccupping in 1922 and he didn’t stop until 1990. In the early years, he would hiccup 40 times per minute and then in later years, it dropped down to 20 per minute.

If you do feel like a hiccup attack won’t stop and you don’t think you could live with the hiccups for 68 years, do a shot of apple cider vinegar and it should settle your hiccups within a few seconds. If that is too intense to drink, simply mix in a bit of sugar.

7. Oil and Red wine Stains

Two of the most dreaded spills that could permanently damage your clothes and carpets are oil and red wine stains. Here are two simple tricks for removing both of these dreaded stains. For oil, simply put flour or baby powder on a fresh stain, let it soak overnight and simply brush it away. You use the same principle on red wine stains, but instead of flour or baby powder, you use salt.

First, you blot the stain, then pour salt on it and let it sit. You’ll see the salt turn pink, then pour some boiling water on the salt from six-to-eight inches above the stain and let it sit. Afterwards, your carpet should look as good as new.

6. Homemade Wrench

Have to remove a bolt or a screw, but don’t have a wrench? Or perhaps, even more irritating, you don’t have the right size wrench? A simple life hack that will eliminate wrenches and hopefully save you from smashing your knuckles when removing a screw or bolt in a tight place, is to use another nut and bolt. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call the bolt you’re using as a wrench “bolt A” and the bolt you want to remove as “bolt B”.

Lay bolt A vertically across the head of bolt B. Make sure the underside of the head of bolt A is touching a flat side of the head of bolt B, then tighten the nut around the head of bolt B. That’s it! You have a simple and easy to use adjustable wrench for under $1.

5. Keep Your Feet Warm In the Winter

When you’re outside in cold weather, one of the first things to get cold is your feet. The reason is that the body is protecting itself from the cold and trying to keep the core of your body, where all your internal organs are located, warm and safe. That means blood flow to your hands and feet become limited, making them colder. So that is why it is important to have warm footwear when venturing outside in cold weather. A way to improve the warmth of even the cheapest boots is to go to a dollar store and buy a sun sheet.

Once you’re back home, because the dollar store people really didn’t like it when we did it in the store, take off your boots and remove the insoles. Place the insoles face down on the sheet, trace the outside of them with a Sharpie, and finally, cut the sun sheet. Now you just put the sun sheet in your boot and then put your insole in over top of it. This will add insulation between you and the cold ground and it will also reflect your body heat back up into you.

4. Homemade Febreze

This life hack is excellent for anyone who doesn’t want to clean up, or shell out a few dollars for a bottle of Febreze. If that’s you, you should maybe question your life choices or, even better, you could just make your own Febreze. To do this, you’ll need an empty spray bottle. Fill it with one and a half cups of water; add one tablespoon of baking soda and one-to-two tablespoons of fabric softener. Finally, shake and spray. Now you can continue to live without washing anything until new life starts to grow.

3. Sand at The Beach

 Sand at the beach has the amazing ability to get into everything you brought with you to the beach, and when you leave, it is impossible to get rid of it. The solution? Bring a fitted bed sheet as a blanket and put your items in the four corners to stretch out the sheet. It will not only help keep sand off the blanket, it will also keep the sand out of any objects that are on the blanket as well.

2. Editing

We’re totally setting ourselves up for snarky comments, but we’re going to plow ahead anyway. Learning how to edit can completely transform your writing. One life hack that can bring you to that next level of writing is to simply listen to your work. Microsoft Word andMac computers come with text-to-voice features, and there are other free programs that do the same thing. Once you are ready to edit, have the computer read your writing back to you paragraph by paragraph.

This will allow you to hear if there are any mistakes that are commonly missed by word and grammar checks, like repeated phrases, or missing and misused words. Finally, it will make your writing smoother and more conversational. At the very least, this should help you in arguments with barely literate internet trolls. Not that any of you are trolls, of course. You’re all very lovely and attractive people with many wonderful qualities. What a catch!

1. Two-Second Shirt Fold

If you’re anything like us, doing the laundry can be a multi-day ordeal. Day one is washing and drying the clothes, day two is folding, and on day three you finally put it away. One life hack that will hopefully cut down on some of the work is the two-second shirt fold. To do it, lay the shirt flat, and in your mind, draw an imaginary line that goes through the middle of the shirt horizontally. Next, draw a vertical line halfway between the edge of the shirt and the middle of the shirt. To make it easier, in the video above, they call the spot where the two lines intersect point A. Then the top of the vertical line beside the collar is point B and the bottom of the vertical line is point C.

Pinch the shirt at point A and with your other hand, pick up the shirt at point B and fold B down to C without letting go of point A. At this point, your arms should be crossed. While still holding A in one hand and B and C in the other, simply uncross your arms. Then use the flat surface to fold the shirt back on itself. Of course, that is a lot of information to visualize so if you’re interested in this life hack, please take a few minutes and check out the video above; it could shorten your laundry process by a day.