Make Your Life More Efficient – My New Bowls

For months I came home to cold, crusty oatmeal plastered upon one of the three bowls I owned. With other, more important things on my mind, I’d toss the bowls into the sink. Each morning thereafter, I’d awake to the realization that I had no clean bowls, so I’d have to waste some of my morning cleaning them.

There were two solutions to this problem:

1. The “easy” way – wash the bowl every time I finished eating out of it.

2. The easy way – buy more bowls.

Long story short, I bought 12 more bowls from Wal-Mart for 6 dollars. Now, if for some reason I forget to rinse a bowl out, I have a backup. Even if I forget for almost two weeks to rinse a bowl out, I still have a backup.

Here are some other situations I have experienced firsthand, along with my simple solution:

• Constantly leaving clothes downstairs instead of upstairs – Put a laundry basket downstairs.
• Skipping breakfast – Put a box or two of granola bars or something similar under the passenger seat in your car. This will keep them from melting.
• Forgetting items on trips – This one is great if you have a roommate. Instead of the tried and true method of a constant list, which is often woefully incomplete, go shopping by yourself. Call your roommate or sig. other and ask them if you need certain things as you go. This will help you avoid having no more room in the freezer, three bottles of ketchup, and dragging back out at midnight for a two dollar bag of sugar. You’ll also go through the store faster because you’ll be trying to save minutes.
• Cleaning your computer’s desktop – Create a new folder and name it “Don’t Want to Organize Yet.” Every week or so, you’ll notice that your desktop is cluttered. Unlike real life, you can cram as many shortcuts and random documents as you want under the bed. Drag the crap you don’t want into this folder, and organize/delete on a rainy day.
• Opening your typical routine of internet windows – This is a quick time-saver if you have Firefox. (Which you should.) Firefox allows you to create bookmark folders just like any other browser, but it has one more option that saves you a lot of time. I’m going to demonstrate how to do this in Firefox version 2, but it should work in version 3 as well.

1. Open a new window (Control + N) and open every website you typically visit in a tab.
2. In the bookmarks menu, click “Bookmark All Tabs…” or press Control + Shift + D.
3. Name your folder and save it.
4. From now on, simply go back to the Bookmarks menu and into the folder you saved. At the bottom, there will be an option which says “Open All in Tabs.”

Voila.