45 Hacks That Will Speed Up Anyone’s Daily Routine

If you’ve got long, singular hairs on your face that really need to go and don’t have any better way of doing it, you can actually use thread to get them. Granted, you’ll need to twist around a bunch of thread, form an hourglass shape, and perfect the technique of perfectly catching those hairs between them, but it’s an option.

Of course, if you had to cut a piece of thread with a sharp blade of some sort to begin with, then chances are you could also just use that. This hack is probably more of something to try for fun than top efficiency.

Is your razor too dull to clean your legs, face, or whatever part of your body needs trimming? You don’t need to throw it away and replace it. You can lay out a pair of denim jeans and slide the blades down the fabric to sharpen them up for better performance.

Of course, this won’t keep your razor going forever, but it will extend its durability by a bit, meaning you won’t have to buy replacement blades quite as frequently.

Need to get a shell off of a boiled egg as quickly and painlessly as possible? Peel the tip of the shell off, then lift it up to your mouth and blow as hard as you can. If you perfect this technique, you can blow the egg white right out of the opposite end of the shell.

Of course, we wouldn’t recommend doing this if you are going to have someone else eat that egg, but if it’s for you, it’s not like there’s any harm in it.

Do you have trouble getting your USB to go into the port the right way every time? Well, simply mark the side of the USB with a permanent marker so you know which way is up, and you won’t ever have that problem again. A simple solution for a simple problem.

If you want, you could mark the computer as well to be double sure, but honestly that’s not exactly needed to achieve the desired end result.

Does your computer get really hot when resting on any surface? Well, you can mitigate that risk pretty easily. If you have an egg carton that no longer has any eggs to hold, simply take the bottom, tear it away from the other half, and flip it upside down.

If you rest your computer on top of this, the fans will have more room to pull in air and keep the computer cool. This will greatly extend its effective life!

Eager to drink a can of Cola, but it’s too warm for your liking? Get a bowl of water, pour some ice into it, then mix in a spoonful of salt, stirring thoroughly. Put the can into the mixture for about a minute and it will cool down much more quickly than usual.

You can leave it in longer than that if you really want to chill out, but just be careful not to do it for too long, or it might actually be too much!

Have something written down that needs to be copied to a digital format? Have one of those nifty pants hangers with the clips? Clip the paper to one side, and attach the other clip to the top of your computer. By doing this, you can easily look between the two.

Moreover, you don’t have to constantly look down or away from your computer, so this will make the process a lot faster overall!

If you’re doing any painting, then you know the danger of getting it on your skin. It’s extremely hard to get off! If you would like to clean it off far more easily, simply use a cloth dipped in vegetable oil. The combination of oil and scrubbing will get it off in no time.

Of course, you should probably wait until you’re done painting, or you’ll just have to repeat the process several times!

Have your shoes lost their laces? Or better yet, are you annoyed by the concept of having to tie laces every time you put your shoes on? You can replace those laces with zip ties, and as long as you tighten them at the right spot, they’ll always be perfect from then on.

The problem is that you’ll have to redo them if you feel that they are too tight or loose later, but it’s not like zip ties are expensive.

Are you reluctant to use your tools because they are covered in rust? There’s an easy way to clean them, and all it requires is a container large enough to hold the tool and enough vinegar to cover it in. Simply let the tool rest in the vinegar long enough for the rust to be leeched out.

Once that’s done, a light bit of scrubbing and drying via a cloth is more than enough to clean away rust of almost any level.

You can’t really get rid of scratches on a phone screen. However, you can reduce how glaringly obvious they are, simply by rubbing toothpaste on your phone screen, then wiping it down. The scratches won’t be magically erased of course, but they won’t be as noticeable.

Either way, it’s a much cheaper way to take care of the problem than actually getting a screen replacement, so considering giving it a try.

If you have a pair of jeans, or any pants with belt loops, that are a bit too wide in the waist for you, you don’t have to send them back or give them away. You can take just about anything you can tie a knot with and pull it between the two belt loops near your pocket.

Pull until the waist fits you, then tie a knot and tuck the excess into your pocket. With a long enough shirt, no one will see it anyway!

Broken egg in your carton? You don’t have to throw it away. Heat up a pot of water and a spoonful of vinegar, and pour the contents of the broken egg inside. With a bit of stirring, you can transform the yolk and the whites into a delicious breakfast item.

It may not look especially pretty as far as visuals go, but in the end, what really matters is whether or not it tastes good, right?

Need to carry multiple bags, and don’t want to have them wear into your fingers? If you can get your hand on one of those clips often used for rappelling, then you’ve got an easy way to carry multiple bags at once. Of course, the weight won’t change, but the focus of the pressure will be less.

Besides, you could also use this strategy to clip bags onto your clothes or whatnot in order to carry them around that way. There is potential!

If you’re having trouble opening a bottle with a metal cap, there are a few ways to solve that problem. However, if you’re wearing a ring of any sort, you don’t have to go and find a special tool at all! Simply use the ring to give you the leverage you need.

It may be a simple hack, but few people actually think about the potential usefulness of the ring on their finger! It’s underused, really!

We all know how easy it is for cords to get tangled. Even when you roll them up, they often managed to get twisted somehow. To avoid that, you can simply roll them up as neatly as possible, then use a hair clip to keep them as safe from tangling as possible.

This cheap hack is a great way to cut back on the wear and tear a cord will take over a period of time, and nearly everyone has what they need to do it.

Putting a potato on a plate and then in the microwave means that the part on the bottom has a pretty high chance of not being properly heated. But if you make little legs for the potato using toothpicks, you can ensure that the entire potato is heated evenly.

Naturally, this means you’ll have much tastier, much more appetizing potatoes, and who doesn’t want that? We certainly see the potential in it!

Letting your nails dry after painting them can take quite some time, which is a pain in the neck. To speed up the process as much as possible, simply put your nails in a bowl of cold water immediately after painting them. Let them sit for just a little bit, and they’ll actually dry faster when you take them out.

It may seem counterproductive to use water to expedite the drying process, but if you doubt it, just give it a shot yourself and see!

We recommend that you do this very carefully and at your own risk. If you need a cup holder while working on your laptop but don’t have any space to make that happen, you can use your computer’s open disk drive as a makeshift cup holder.

Of course, if a really heavy drink is in question, you may not want to do this, as it could potentially damage your disk drive. Then again, how often are disks used these days anyway?

You know when you accidentally hit the edge of a rug, it can be super annoying. Well, with double-sided tape and Velcro, and you can secure the edges of your rug to the floor so that this won’t happen as often or as severely. Moreover, it’s easy to remove in the future if you have to.

After all, you don’t want to be nailing rugs to the floor or anything, so frankly, this is the next best choice, and the resources involved are cheap.

Do you have trouble finding the lip of the duct tape? Turn it over again and again trying to find purchase with your nails? Next time you finish up with the duct tape consider putting a paper clip on the lip so that you can find it easily next time.

When you’re done with it, you can just take the same paperclip and move it to the new position. That way, you’ll never have to struggle with this again.

Are you lacking access to a popcorn container for some reason? Or do you just want even easier access to it than usual? You can wear your hoodie backward, pour the popcorn in, and have easy access to it all the time. The real benefit is that it saves you space.

This hack is really just more about convenience than anything else, as it doesn’t necessarily make anything easier, but it does make it simpler.

Do you need to drill a hole for an object of a certain length? No problem. Just hold the object up to your drill so you know how far you need to go into the wall, then place some tape there so you know what point to drill to. It’s an easy way to get the job done.

Moreover, you don’t have to worry about drilling too far into the wall, and everything will fit as perfectly as possible.

Extension cords coming undone? Instead of trusting them to stay together, which often fails, why not try looping the two cords together? Sure this will reduce the range of the cord by just a little bit, but that’s a small price to pay to stop the nuisance of constant disconnections.

Besides, usually extension cords give you a little extra to work with, so why not take advantage of that and reduce the frustration involved with work?

This may sound weird at first, but hear us out. If you need the airflow from a fan to go in more than one direction at a time, there’s an odd thing you can do to make that happen. Simply attach a pair of pants to it! Odd as it sounds, the pants legs will direct the air in two directions.

Of course, you could use other things to achieve this end, but a pair of pants is something that nearly everyone has available. Just make sure they’re of the lighter variety!

We all know that there’s a pretty high chance of a piece of eggshell getting in the bowl when you are cracking an egg. You don’t need to stick your fingers in to get it. Just take one half of the eggshell you just cracked and use it to scoop up the small piece.

It’s quick, easy, and doesn’t get your fingers or any other utensil dirty, especially since you’ll be throwing away the eggshell anyway.

Keyrings are hard to hold open with your fingers when you need to actually add a key to them. If you have a staple remover, you can use its thin edges to make space for you much more easily, without hurting your fingers or your nails.

Of course, this would require you to have a staple remover first, something not everyone has lying around. They are cheap to procure though.

When you drop a glass, the end result can be a ton of tiny little shards on the ground that are dangerous and tedious to pick up one at a time. If you have plasticine lying around, you can use it to easily gather broken glass shards.

That said, not everyone has that lying around for use, but if this type of accident happens often for you, maybe you should consider buying some for these situations!

Do you hate doing the dishes? Or do you simply not want to make a mess while eating? Either way, covering the plate you are going to eat on with plastic wrap means you’ll have no trouble with cleaning up, as any mess will get on the plastic wrap and not on the plate.

This is a great choice when you are eating anything that is a hassle or a mess. Make your dishwashing life easier by cutting back on how many you have to wash at all!

Connecting a bracelet can be a hassle. However, if you take a paperclip and make an S out of it, you can use it to hold one end of the bracelet while you loop the other end around and connect it. Simple and easy, and less of a pain than doing things the normal way.

There’s actually a lot that you can do with a paperclip in making your day to day life easier. But this is just one of them.

Finally, there’s one more thing you can do with toothpaste that you may not expect. It can actually be used to treat burns! Toothpaste has a soothing effect on such burns and can help reduce the pain you feel in the hours when a fresh burn is most painful.

In fact, it’s a far better option than ice, which you aren’t supposed to put on burns, and an alternative to constantly keeping your hand under running water!

If you have to pour paint into a container, you can be sure that it will stain it. If you don’t want that to happen, put a plastic bag for lining within the container, and secure it with a rubber band. This will keep the container from getting paint all over it.

Ultimately, this helps ensure that you can still use such a container for some other task down the line if you needed to.

If you have a setup with a whole lot of cords, it may be difficult for you to remember what goes where, especially if they aren’t continuously plugged in. Well, get some colored tape and a marker, and label everything so you know what goes where when it’s time to plug in.

This will save you a lot of time and hassle when dealing with all of your electronics, and it hardly costs anything at all.

If you have a key that snaps in a lock, you may feel like you have to call the locksmith right away. But there is something you can try first. If you have super glue or hot glue or something similar, you can try and glue the end back on (or anything stiff enough to let you turn it), and you may be able to extricate the key.

Now, this is highly dependent on just how stuck the key is, but if nothing else, it wouldn’t hurt to try before paying a bunch of money for a locksmith!

Many of us wish we could rest our feet while sitting at a desk. If you have the right things lying around, you can fix that. Cloth, wooden sticks or stakes, and rope is all you need. You may have to do a little extra work depending on the nature of your materials.

That said, the basic premise is the same: the sticks go on the edges of the cloth, the rope is tied around them, and you can then secure them to the legs of your desk.

Do you need to hide the nature of your can for whatever reason? Simply cut away the outside of another, less suspicious can, and slide it over the one that you want to hide. Voila, you have successfully disguised your can as something else entirely.

Of course, we can’t recommend doing this to break rules or anything, officially speaking. But hey, as long as nobody actually says it, right?

If you don’t want to hold up your tablet all the time and don’t want to spend too much money on those silly gadgets that hold them up, you can make your own tablet stand with a picture frame and double-sided tape. Simply stick the frame to the back of your tablet.

And of course, the best part is that you could easily remove it at any time you needed to, so it’s not like it’ll be part of the tablet forever!

Sometimes, the fridge just doesn’t have enough space. In that scenario, magnets are your friend! Stick them to the top of the fridge, than you can hang any compatible container from them, creating extra space! It’s a great way to maximize what you have available.

All that empty space can be made use of via magnets, and magnets are pretty cheap to get, so it’s a life hack that won’t set anyone back much!

Do you need a mirror for some reason? Are you unable to get to one, or just don’t feel like going to one? Well, these days our electronic devices can do the job just fine! All you have to do is activate the camera that nearly any device has these days.

Phone, tablet, computer, you name it: just about anything will do if you suddenly need to see what you look like for some reason.

Actually, toothpaste can do a lot of things besides clean your teeth. They can clean stubborn pots too! Simply pour some toothpaste on the dirty pot and start scrubbing away. You’ll be surprised by how much easier it becomes to clean it!

Add some warm water to the mix and soon you’ll have taken a dirty pot from a mess in the sink to a clean, ready to cook on a piece of kitchenware.

There is no denying that trying to open a pickle jar can take way too much time for its own good. Sure, those sour treats inside are the perfect thing to add to a homemade burger. But are they really worth all that time and effort?

Thankfully, the following hack will help make this trivial part of your daily routine not so arduous. Simply wrap some duct tape around the edge and pull the end.

Isn’t it amazing how many times certain items of clothing are still wet even when it has been rolling around in a dryer for a couple of hours? Without wasting too much electricity trying to fix this, you could perform the following hack.

What you need to do is put the item of clothing inside a plastic bag. Then, place a hairdryer inside and turn it on, which should make the bag look like it’s inflated. After a minute or so, the clothes should be dry.

Many of us work from home these days and that often means we will have some snacks from time to time as we type away at our keyboards. Consequentially, we are bound to get a lot of crumbs and debris trapped inside the gaps of that keyboard.

And yet, simply tipping the keyboard over doesn’t get all of the garbage out. If you take a post-it note and slowly drag it along each gap, you will see a lot of crumbs build up on the sticky edge.

It seems like our shoelaces are always getting ruined, especially the ends of them. How many times does the clip holding the ends together fall off during our daily routine? Thankfully, someone came up with the following hack to ensure that these laces are no longer obsolete.

What you need to do is take a piece of plastic, wrap it around the end, and gently hover a lighter underneath it. This will melt the plastic a little, molding it around the threads.

For those of us whose sofas are positioned toward the wall, how many times have we dropped our keys or something valuable behind there? It can get awfully frustrating having to pull the furniture back every time we have to retrieve them.

Well, why not do this? Take a magnet and connect it to the end of some measuring tape. Then, lower the tape to the bottom of the sofa and your keys should stick to the magnet. Simply pull the table back and voila – problem solved.

You know, toothbrushes aren’t just there to brush one’s teeth. If you have a spare one lying about, you can use it to clean all the gunk from your bathroom walls. Here’s how you do it.

First, drill a screw into the middle of the brush head, before cutting it off with some pliers. Then, connect the screw to your electric drill and then gently rub your new rotating brush against the wall.

This might not apply to everyone’s daily routines, but hey, there are plenty of people out there who like having a glass of wine when they get home from work. As you can see, the head of a gardening rake actually works really well as a hanger for wine glasses.

In order to make your makeshift hanger, take the head off and add super glue to the base of it. Then, simply stick to the kitchen wall.

You might think that rubber gloves are only good for protecting your hands while washing the dishes or cleaning the toilet. But have you ever thought about how different parts of these gloves can actually solve all kinds of everyday problems?

If you cut the fingers from one of these gloves, you can add them to the legs of furniture, meaning that you won’t create marks when dragging tables and chairs along the floor. You can also use parts of a glove to fasten milk cartons and Coke bottles.

Repurposing random materials can be so rewarding, especially when it allows you to drink some much-needed coffee. After all, a heavy intake of caffeine and various parts of the day can be very useful, especially for people who have to work from home.

For this hack, you can take a used glass jar and connect a handle to it. All you have to do next is add some instant coffee and pour the boiling water. Easy!

While this might not be the most essential hack on this list, it certainly makes cutting a banana much easier. All you will need is a fork and some pliers (and a banana, of course).

You can easily twist the tines of the fork with the pliers and then you can cut multiple banana slices at once. And when you are done cutting the banana, you can simply twist the tines of the fork back to their default position.

Is peeling a banana a pain for you? Well don’t worry, it’s a pain for a lot of people, and you can make it easier. In fact, all you have to do is split the banana in half, at which point it’s much easier to get the banana off of both pieces.

It’s an extremely quick and painless way to go about this generally annoying task that is more of a hassle than it really needs to be.

When you use a hammer to remove a nail from a wall, there’s a significant chance to accidentally damage your wall, or scuff it at the very least. Consider using a sponge along the way! Place it where the hammer would usually press up against the wall.

This will prevent any significant damage from befalling the wall and still get the nail out without any trouble at all.

So you want to open a bottle of wine, but your corkscrew is broken. Well, so long as you still have the screw itself, as well as a power drill, you can combine the two and still make use of your corkscrew to get the job done. Actually, it’ll be even faster and less tiring than usual!

Or you could just go out and buy a new corkscrew of course, but this method could save you in a moment when a corkscrew breaks on you suddenly, and you don’t feel like leaving home.

Need to tie your shoes even faster than usual? Take one lace, make a loop, take the other lace, make a loop, and simply pull them through each other into a knot. We’re not going to say that it’s the sturdiest way to secure your footwear, but it’s doable.

If you just need to go out real quick, there’s no reason you can’t tie your shoes in this quick manner that’s good enough for the job.

If you’ve got pimples or spots on your face that need to go away, you don’t have to rely on expensive store-bought creams. Toothpaste is also a valid strategy, believe it or not. Toothpaste on the skin will dry out those pimples and help them go away faster.

Of course, it’s not an instant process and will probably have to be repeated for a few days, but a few dots of toothpaste on your face for a few minutes a night isn’t all that bad.