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People are sharing the simple life hacks that made their daily routine so much easier

Here are 17 changes that can have big results.

life hacks, simple life hacks, atomic habits
via Unsplash

She's enjoying the big benefits of some simple life hacks.

James Clear’s landmark book “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” has sold more than 9 million copies worldwide. The book is incredibly popular because it has a simple message that can help everyone. We can develop habits that increase our productivity and success by making small changes to our daily routines.

"It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis,” James Clear writes. “It is only when looking back 2 or 5 or 10 years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.”

His work proves that we don’t need to move mountains to improve ourselves, just get 1% better every day.

Most of us are reluctant to change because breaking old habits and starting new ones can be hard. However, there are a lot of incredibly easy habits we can develop that can add up to monumental changes.

A Reddit user named Accomplished-Rough36 was looking to find simple life hacks that can make a big impact so they asked the online forum, “What life hack became your daily routine?” and received more than 5,300 responses. The best answers were simple, effective habits anyone can implement that can yield big benefits.

The Reddit users shared a whole lot of great ideas for dealing with the things we all have a hard time staying on top of such as keeping a clean house, creating good sleep habits and breaking free from technology addiction.

Here are 17 of the best responses to “What life hack became your daily routine?”

1.

"I flip my pill bottles after taking them so I remember if I took them or not. really helps if you take the same pill in morning and at night." — [deleted]

2.

"Sleeping with a pillow between my knees. No more lower back pain." — fiddyk50

3.

"Don’t put it down, put it away.” — arcady


4.

"Washing dishes while cooking. Now it’s at a point where I just do it because I want a clean kitchen." — devatrox

5.

"I bought 24 pairs of the same socks and threw the rest of miss matching ones away. I have a couple 'winter socks' and that’s it." — familiarfate01

6.

When I'm trying to sleep in bed at night I go over what I did that day and think of everything I did in a positive light or as if it's part of a goal I'm working towards. I've never been depressed (or at least diagnosed with it!) but this helps feeling like I've accomplished something and I can feel better about what I've done. Celebrate every little thing you did, and also it helps me fall asleep a little bit faster too." — anderoogigwhore

7.

"Saying 'thank you' instead of apologizing for things that dont need apologies. I'm a chronic apologizer and it's helped a lot. For example, if I have a bad day and vent to my husband, instead of saying 'sorry for venting and bringing down the mood, I'll say 'thank you for listening and being supportive.' It puts a much more appreciative and positive light on your relationships!" — thegracefuldork

8.

"My alarm clock is across the room, requiring me to get out of bed to turn it off. Prevents me from falling back asleep." — soik90

9.

"Posting this too late for anyone to see, but I brush my teeth as part of my daughter's bedtime routine. This keeps me from snacking late at night since my teeth already feel clean and I don't want to mess them up before bed. I've lost about 5 inches from my waist, and it keeps me accountable to brush my teeth before I'm too tired to care." — petethepianist

10.

"A work from home life hack I adopted was using break time from work to do low mental energy chores. Stuff like dusting furniture and vacuuming the pool is a nice break from the mental energy of working and I’m getting stuff done." — drakeallthethings

11.

"Preparing/getting stuff ready the night before. For example:

1. Getting my shoes and putting them by the front of the door
2. Packing my backpack with all the things I'll need for that day
3. Getting my underwear, shirt, pants, etc. out and folding them in a pile
4. Packing lunch(es) for that day
5. No more running around in the mornings looking for stuff on a time crunch! It’s become so much less stressful when I know where everything is and I can just get everything (on) and leave." — KomodoJoe3

12.

"Drink. Water. It's something so simple yet so often ignored. Yeah, it can get annoying at times. I never really want to get up at 3:30am to piss. I don't really want to have to stop on, say, a six-hour drive because I have to pee. But, staying well hydrated helps me feel better, look better, rest better (yeah, there's the 3:30am piss, but that's after three hours of sleep. I didn't toss and turn for three hours before then,) etc. And it will help you live longer. Your organs will thank you." — 2020isanightmare

13.

"If it takes less than a minute, just do it." — evelynmtz821

14.

"If you have to put something down for a bit, like say your phone or glass of water, say out loud, 'I'm putting this ____ here.' I guess that by doing that you engage different parts of you brain and makes it more likely for you to remember where you put something when you need it again." — -eDgaAR-

15.

"Ignoring people I don't want to interact with." — ClubZen

16.

"That moment trick from Deadpool.

I have a bad temper, not going to lie. It felt uncontrollable for a while, but it was just because I was always so quick to react. Like as a kid, if my brother said something that rubbed me the wrong way, the next moment, I was trying to fight my brother without even thinking. Now, if something pisses me off, I catch myself and think about why that thing pissed me off. Nine times out of 10, I'm just being dumb and allowing something dumb to upset me. This helps a lot if you rage in video games. Most of the time if you're raging in a game at someone on your team, you're the problem." — _IraPirate_

17.

"Its amazing how much more i get done when i wake up 2 hours earlier." — TysonGoesOutside

This article originally appeared on 10.4.22

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Teacher goes above and beyond for a biology lesson by wearing an anatomically correct suit

That's one way to keep students engaged!

@mikemoratinos/X

Veronica Duque wearing her famous anatomy suit

Being an educator in the American public school system is one of the hardest jobs in our nation. Not only is the work itself challenging, but with constant battles for educational funding and a student body increasingly tethered to their electronic devices, most teachers in America and around the world are navigating uncharted territory when it comes to finding ways to keep their students engaged in their studies.

And that's why when Verónica Duque came across a form-fitting, anatomical bodysuit while doing some online shopping, she thought it would be perfect visual aid to convey vital information (pun intended) to her students in Spain, in a way they'd actually remember.

Turns out, the entire internet would remember it too.

Duque's husband tweeted a collage of images from the classroom lesson, which quickly went viral, with nearly 70,000 likes. Loosely translated, the tweet from her husband Michael reads: "Very proud of this volcano of ideas that I am lucky to have as a wife. Today she explained the human body to her students in a very original way. Great Veronica !!!"

In an interview with Bored Panda, Duque explained the thought process that led her to presenting her third-grade-class with a unique approach to learning.

"I was surfing the internet when an ad of an AliExpress swimsuit popped up," she said. "Knowing how hard it is for kids this young to visualize the disposition of internal organs, I thought it was worth giving it a try."

anatomy, anatomical suit, teachers, science, cool teachers, science class, amazonThis is a teacher who cares. assets.rebelmouse.io

Online retailers like Amazon have a number of similar anatomical bodysuits for sale. While most people apparently purchase them for Halloween costumes or as gag gifts, it's now likely that Duque's viral moment will inspire some other educators around the world to take a similar approach to teaching the body basics to their students.

anatomy, anatomical suit, teachers, science, cool teachers, science class, amazonHalloween costume, check. Amazon

While some on Twitter were critical of the suit, the vast majority have praised Duque for her innovative approach to teaching. And the anatomical bodysuit is reportedly far from her first creative endeavor in the classroom.

"I decided long ago to use disguises for history lessons," she told Bored Panda. "I'm also using cardboard crowns for my students to learn grammatical categories such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Different grammar kingdoms, so to say."

And when it comes to the inevitable, made-up controversy that tends to latch itself onto virtually anyone that goes viral, Duque said she says there's another far more controversial stereotype she hopes her brief moment of fame will help address.

"I'd like society to stop considering teachers to be lazy bureaucratic public servants," she said. "We're certainly not." Get this teacher a raise!

What really works about Duque's presentation is that it engages students in a sensorial experiences, which helps lessons stick (and let's face it, anything that engages he sense nowadays is a godsend). But there are other methods teachers/parents can try that don't involve wearing a suit with guts on 'em.

Here are some suggestions for hands-on "DIY experiments", courtesy of the Little Medical School website:

1. Building the respiratory system by creating a model lung with straws, balloons, bottles, and duct tape

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

2. Sculpting Body parts with Play Doh

(Grab free printable mats on 123Homeschool4Me)

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

3. Build a functioning heart model

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Of course, these lessons are a little more geared towards younger students, but at the same time, it could provide some inspiration for how to get students more involved in their own learning, just like Duque did.

This article originally appeared six years ago.

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Pop Culture

Millennial shares her spot on theory about why Gen Z 'romanticizes' the early 2010s

Here's why she dubbed it the "last era of sweet delusion."

Giphy

A still from HBO's 'Girls'

Travel back in time to 2010. For millennials entering adulthood, this meant navigating through challenges like the aftermath of the Great Recession, getting their first taste of student loan debt, and becoming increasingly vocal about social and political issues.

But 2010 also ushered in new and novel technologies, like the iPad and Instagram (granted, we might be a little jaded towards these things now, but back then, it felt like the dawning of the golden age). And let’s not forget it brought us some pretty epic pop culture moments: Lady Gaga’s famous meat dress, Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win best director at the Oscars for The Hurt Locker, the ending of Lost (!), just to name a few. That’s all without taking into account the hope many people felt as Barrack Obama entered his second term.

Point being—even with the not-so-great stuff happening, there were reasons to feel, as 36-year-old Chelsea Fagan puts it, “an ambient level of optimism about the future.” And she theorizes that it’s this feeling Gen Zers long for when they “romanticize” this time period.

Obama Biden GIFfrom Obama GIFs

In a video posted to her Instagram, she really painted the scene of her own experience as a 20-something entering the workforce—oat milk latte in hand, dodging folks on fixie bikes as Passion Pit’s “Sleepy Head” played on full blast, walking into an open space office with industrial lighting and exposed brick to perform her full time gig writing listicles, and, like other millennials, thinking she had “made it.”

“And I really feel for Gen Z,” she said, “that they never got to enjoy that period of just collective delusion, because it was not long for this world.”

"There's just so many ways in which life is more difficult and less hopeful for young people now than it was for millennials,” she would later tellNewsweek. “Even coming out of the recession, I think being in the Obama administration felt very different.”

In the same interview, she surmised that a major culprit behind this longing is our current relationship with technology, which has gone from wonder and interest to codependency.

"We weren't living on social media as much. I think people were more present, living the life that young people today don't get to enjoy as much. There's more anxiety and self-awareness because everything is so performative now."

So far, the reaction to Fagan’s video has been…palpable. By and large, fellow millennials could recall similar sentiments, particularly on the economy and tech front.

“The stock market was growing, jobs were surging, and while affordability wasn’t as good as when we were kids, it wasn’t crushing like it is today. The Affordable Care Act was brand new and still immensely powerful.”

“We were fresh post recession, deep in debt, and YET life was more affordable.”

Happy Birthday Hbd GIFfrom Happy Birthday GIFs

“It was magical. We just had nothing to lose. There were no jobs and our college degrees were useless, but there was also hope that the world WAS becoming a better place. There was a yearning for a simpler time but in a wholesome way, not an alt right way. The lack of opportunities for ‘real jobs’ allowed people to be creative. And we lived an extended childhood because, why not?”

“The internet still seemed positive and hopeful, and not yet soul crushing and exploitative..”

“I miss when the Internet was fun. When chatrooms and games and fun little websites were a great way to learn and play and even meet others.”

Of course, as few pointed out, even this perspective wasn’t necessarily shared by all, especially those who didn’t come from a middle/upper class background. But the point its, it’s understandable that younger generations might envy the positive future-gazing associated with the era.

Interestingly enough, according to data from the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust at Work, a pessimistic outlook mostly belongs to younger Gen-Zs, while the oldest Gen-Zs are incredibly optimistic. If you look elsewhere, you’ll see that, contrary to popular opinion, a majority of Gen Zers actually do believe they can achieve their goals. So, one could argue that while they don’t have that Millennial brand of optimism, it still shows up in its own way. After all, no matter what generation you hail from, aren’t our 20s all about having a “the world sucks, but I’m gonna make it” kind of attitude?

Our 30s on the other hand…that’s a different vibe entirely.

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American English includes one of the rarest sounds on Earth, but we use it all the time

Er…this is odd.

Photo credit: Canva

Learning to make sounds we didn't grow up with can be tricky.

When (or if) kids learn phonics at school, they're taught the symbols that go with sounds of their country's native language or languages. People all around the world grow up learning to make specific sounds with their mouths by imitating the language(s) they are immersed in, which can leave us completely unaware of how many other sounds there are until we hear a language that's far different from our own.

Even the common foreign languages that American school kids learn have sounds that can be tricky to get down. The rolled "r" in Spanish. The nuances of French vowel pronunciations. The glottal stops in German. The sound that's a mix between "r" and "l" in Japanese. And for people learning English, one of the trickiest sounds to get down is "er," as in the American pronunciation of "bird," "world," "summer," or "percent."

Oddly enough, for as common as the "er" sound is in English, it's linguistically rare. According to the Linguistics Channel @human1011, the "er" sound is found in less than 1% of the world's languages, rarer than the click consonants found in some languages in East and Southern Africa.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

As rare as the sound is, there are a lot of people in the world who use it, mainly because it's also used in Mandarin Chinese, or at least many variations of it. So, while there aren't many languages that use it, by sheer numbers of people, it's not that uncommon.

"So, a sound that's so rare that it's in less than 1% of the world's languages just happens to exist in the two most spoken languages on Earth? Can that really be a coincidence?" the @human1011 video asks. Well, yes. English and Chinese don't share a common linguistic root, so those sounds just happened to evolve in very different parts of the planet. According to some people in the comments of the video, there are regional dialects in Brazil where the "er" sound is used and in certain parts of the Netherlands as well.

Pronouncing the "er" sound is hard if you don't grow up with it, largely because it's all about the placement and shape of the tongue inside the mouth combined with the way the lips are positioned. That combination is physically tricky to show someone. This video, from a non-native-English-speaker does a good job of explaining the mouth movements that create the sound.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

What's particularly interesting about the "er" sound in American English is that it functions as a vowel sound. Most of us learned that the vowels in English are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, and that's true as far as written vowels go, but vowel sounds are different. In the word "bird," the letter "i" is a vowel, but doesn't make any of the "i" sounds that we learned in school. Instead, the "ir" combine to make the "er" vowel sound. It's called an r-controlled vowel, and we see it in tons of words like "work," "were," "burn," "skirt," etc.

Learn something new every day, right?

Here's another video that explains the physical aspects of articulating the r-controlled vowel sound.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Most of us don't think about the fact that sounds we pronounce without even thinking about it have to be specifically learned and practiced by people who didn't grow up with them. It's not until we start trying to learn a language that's different from our own that we see how many sounds we have to work hard to make, sometimes even having to train our mouth muscles in ways they've never been used before.

It's also a good reminder to be patient and kind with people who are learning a language. It's not easy, and anyone making an effort to communicate in someone else's language deserves our grace and kudos.

You can follow @human1011 on YouTube for more interesting linguistics trivia.

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Humor

"How to use a printer" satire perfectly captures our frustration with modern technology

There's a word for why everything that should be awesome by now seems to be getting worse.

Canva Photos

Home printers are incredibly frustrating to use, and they aren't getting better.

Anyone who has ever printed a document at home knows the inevitable rage of dealing with your standard home-office inkjet printer. They're clunky, unreliable, and prone to a litany of problems—everything from drivers to ink cartridges to the WIFI is bound to malfunction at some point. And without a usable interface, they're extremely difficult to troubleshoot on your own.

The problem with printers is that they have been around since at least the 80s. And while the technology has improved in some ways, they remain incredibly buggy and difficult, and printer manufacturers have found infuriating ways to make them even more annoying and expensive to use. (Ink cartridge subscriptions, anyone?)

office space, printer, printers, home office, technology, profitsThe boys from Office Space knew how to handle wayward printers.Giphy

But YouTuber Gus Johnson is here to help. He's created a perfectly simple guide for anyone who wants to get their printer set up and begin printing documents. Let's go!

First, Johnson walks us through how to make sure our printer is turned on. It's on? OK, great! Now we're ready to print—well, after the printer installs the 18 mandatory driver updates.

Once those are all done, it's time to print. Except it turns out the ink is low—well, not low, but low-ish, which means the printer won't print until you replace all of the cartridges. And no, you are not allowed to print in black and white if your magenta is low, just so you know.

The cartridges, by the way, are not compatible between printers and often not reliably sold in stores. So, Johnson shows us how to order them online and then wait. Days later, now we're ready to print! Well, after one more new cartridge update installs, and of course given that you can figure out how to get your supposedly "wireless printer" to talk to your laptop.

Johnson's video is a gut-busting watch for anyone who's grappled with a home printer and been tempted to pull an Office Space on it with a hefty baseball bat. Watch the whole thing here:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Printers are a really complicated piece of technology. But that shouldn't let them off the hook. Most of the problems spoofed in Johnson's video are solvable. And that's exactly the larger issue.

The Wirecutter writes that "there is some amazingly complicated technology in your printer, including the printheads, the ink, and the mapping software. You take your printer for granted, but that box can cover a piece of paper in millions of dots of precisely located, color-matched ink in a few seconds," and that most manufacturers take a loss on the actual machinery of a printer, hoping to recoup the earnings via ink sales later down the road.

If printers were the only piece of technology that seem to get worse and worse, bleeding us for more and more money while offering a rapidly deteriorating product, maybe we'd be willing to spare a few tears for the poor manufacturers. But this is a global problem affecting practically everything we touch—from social media, streaming content, journalism, and even restaurants. We pay more or the same for something that doesn't ever get any better, and often gets worse!

There's a term for this phenomenon. It's officially called "enshittification," or platform decay.

Writer Cory Doctrow, who coined the term, describes the pattern like this: "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

Bill Maher described Silicon Valley's approach to technology as, "If it ain't broke, f*ck with it."

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Doctrow even mentioned printers specifically in a recent Medium post:

"They make printer-scanners that won’t scan unless all four ink cartridges are installed and haven’t reached their best-before dates. They make printers that won’t print black and white if your $50 magenta cartridge is low. They sell you printers with special half-full cartridges that need to be replaced pretty much as soon as the printer has run off its mandatory 'calibration' pages. The full-serving ink you buy to replace those special demitasse cartridges is also booby-trapped — HP reports them as empty when they’re still 20% full. ... HP tricks customers into signing up for irrevocable subscriptions where you have to pay every month, whether or not you print, and if you exceed your subscription cap, the printer refuses to work, no matter how much ink is left."

Ink is outrageously expensive, but the printer companies exploit copyright laws to make sure you can't buy third party cartridges. When that fails, they push out security updates that break compatibility with anything but their own ink cartridges. These kinds of offenses go on and on.

In other words, long ago it was very exciting that we were able to print our own documents at home. Initial innovations focused on making that process better and better. But we're long past that now and the problems with most home printers will probably remain forever, or as long as manufacturers think they can keep squeezing our wallets. They're not really incentivized to make a printer that actually uses 100% of an ink cartridge or reliably connects to WIFI—they just want to make sure we buy the next one.

Johnson's YouTube rant is so funny precisely because it's true, but also because it finds humor in the frustration we all share at this cycle of enshittification. If we can't get our $300 printer to reliably spit out a basic black and white document, at least we can all laugh at our shared misery.

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A former hoarder gives life-changing hacks on how to declutter your world

"I was literally drowning in clutter."

Photo by Samet Kurtkus on Unsplash

A hoarder's home.

Sometimes, it simply starts with one pile. Some receipts, pay stubs, and bills. Then another pile forms—a shirt you meant to hang up, some workout gear. The piles begin to multiply, and before you know it, they've erupted like tiny volcanoes spewing lava (and junk) around your home. If you don’t even know where to begin in terms of clean-up, you're not alone.

cleaning, clutter, piles, hoarding, hoarderCleaning Hoarding GIF by 60 Second DocsGiphy

Mai Zimmy, on the TikTok page Mom Life & Cleaning, knows this feeling all too well. With over 400,000 followers and 9.1 million likes, she's living proof that an inability to organize is more common than one might think. In one post, she confesses that she was once a hoarder while showing screenshots of her cluttered house in 2020. Her voiceover exclaims, "I was literally drowning in clutter" as the camera pans over a junk-filled bathtub she dubs the "trash tub."

Now, just a few years later, she has helpful tips on how to remedy the situation. She mentions, right off the bat, that she learned the fundamental methods from "Queen" Marie Kondo. Questions like "Does it spark joy? Have you used/worked with it in the last year? Remove duplicates" and more, made famous by Kondo, help her begin. This leads to the truthful realization, "You can't clean clutter."

The first step, she says, is to "Learn to let go." Per Kondo, she shows how to put things into categories and work through them one step at a time.

@maizimmy

Ok. Maybe I was 1% of the problem 😆😅 people ask me all the time how I got my house in order when it was SO FAR GONE. The decluttering and cleaning schedule was HUGE. But even more than that was how my life has changed and just gotten easier over time. The babies aren’t helpless babies forever. It gets easier there for sure one they are in grade school. Plus, the obvious elephant in the room 😅 being a divorced mom in MY situation is about 100 times easier than what I was going through as a “married single mom”. I by no means want to promote divorce, but I do want to promote healthy marriages. No marriage counselor would have ever said my marriage was healthy and that is abundantly clear with how stress free life feels after leaving. #momlife #motherhood #cleantok #cleaningmotivation #cleanwithme #declutter @Procter & Gamble @Clorox

Step two is to "Implement a cleaning schedule." The idea is for that decluttering becomes an actual habit, etched into your mind. She urges people to "find cleaning schedules that work for you." She writes over a cleaning video, "I personally aim to do a nightly reset of the kitchen and living room before bed because these are the most-used parts of my home." She adds, "Then I have my weekly 1.5-hour reset and the occasional 'panic clean' before people come over lol."

Zimmy tells us that the third step is the most important to remember: "Give yourself some grace." She confesses, "When my home was at its worst, I was a 'married single mom' of three kids, two and under." She further relays that she had a full-time job, only to come home "to the second shift of taking care of everything for everyone." She then, adorably, throws some clothes into drawers, writing she still believes in the #NoFoldMethod.

She stresses the idea that "sometimes we're just in the thick of it. Things won't be so crazy forever, and to make the effort to do what you can in the free moments you have." She jokes, "As kids grow and life sorts itself out, you'll realize you were never the problem. Everyone else was." (She then notes in her TikTok description, "Okay, maybe I was ONE percent of the problem.")

Many in the comments seemed to really connect to her use of the phrase "married single mom." Zimmy also writes, "I by no means want to promote divorce, but I do want to promote healthy marriages. No marriage counselor would have ever said my marriage was healthy, and that is abundantly clear with how stress-free life feels after leaving."

In Zimmy's vulnerability, she gets to the root of what was or wasn’t working for her without vilifying anyone. Decluttering is so much more than tidying up, and many therapists explain what it can do to lift depression and anxiety. In her piece "The Many Mental Benefits of Decluttering" for Psychology Today, Diane Roberts Stoler, Ed.D. writes, "Excessive clutter often leads to feelings of shame, hopelessness, and guilt. The feelings can spiral, making it difficult to find the motivation to address the clutter. If someone is already suffering from depression, a cluttered home can worsen that depression. It is often a cycle. The more depressed you get, the harder it is to clean and organize."

Big and small changes, with a game plan and grace for yourself, can help break the shame spiral and get your living space actually "livable" again.

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