Simple Things You’ve Been Doing Wrong Your Whole Life
You’ve probably been around on this planet for a few years now, so you might think you have a pretty good grasp on how to do stuff. Surprisingly, however, there are a lot of things that most of us are probably doing wrong, even with all our years of experience and expertise. Once you see how you’re supposed to be doing them, you’ll wonder why you never did those things that way before. It will change your life.
Eating Cherries
While cherries are a delicious summer treat, they can also be a little difficult to eat if you struggle with pitting them. The traditional “spit the pits out into a bowl” method is tried and true, certainly, but there’s an easier, cleaner way of eating them that most of us probably haven’t tried but should.
Grab a straw and get ready to enjoy some cherries! Push the straw through the middle to pit the cherries perfectly every time, and you can enjoy them without having to worry about spitting out the pits. It’s such an easy hack.
Phone Speakers
Finding a good way to blast some music should be a straightforward process. But what happens when you forget to bring your speaker to the picnic, or the battery dies halfway through? Most of us probably crank the volume up as loud as it goes and hope for the best.
There’s a better solution to the music problem, though — and you don’t even need any special technology for it. As long as you have a cup big enough to hold over your phone’s speaker, you’re all set! Just put your phone in the cup, and it will boost the sound tremendously.
Cooling Bottles
It’s pretty frustrating to drink a lukewarm beverage when you were hoping for a cool one. You can put a bottle in the fridge and even after a seemingly endless amount of time and still end up with a relatively warm drink. Luckily, you’ve been going about chilling our bottles all wrong — there’s an easy solution that can save you from the tragedy of a warm soda.
Before you put the bottles in the fridge, wrap them in damp paper towels. They’ll cool down to the perfect temperature in as little as 15 minutes! You’ll never have to wait for a cold beverage again.
Putting a Key on a Keyring
This seemingly simple task has cost many a person pain in their nails and fingers (and, let’s be honest, a little sanity as well). It’s something that needs to be done fairly often, though — whenever you get a new key or dispose of an old one, or when it’s time for a swanky new keychain..
There’s a way to save your fingers, though. Next time, use a staple remover to open the keyring up, and you can slide keys off and on with ease. No more nail damage or pain.
Using Extension Cords
Considering how much we rely on technology every day, you’d think we’d be better at using extension cords by now, yet we struggle with the frustration of suddenly losing power to devices because the cord came unplugged from the extension cord, which happens all too easily.
There’s a simple solution to make sure that never happens again. All you have to do is tie a loose knot between the device cord and the extension cord before plugging them in, and they won’t come unplugged from each other. No more mid-movie disasters or mid-essay tragedies!
Packing
Everyone’s struggled with the restrictions on carry-on sizes when traveling by plane. It seems like you can barely fit anything in those bags! Despite years of practice and dozens of flights, you probably continue to struggle with the right way to pack in order to maximize space in those bags.
You’re also probably packing wrong. If you want to maximize the number of clothes you can pack, roll our clothes, don’t fold them. Rolling them will give you a lot more space to work with, which means more clothes you can bring for our trip!
Drinking Iced Coffee
In a time when coffee is available at practically every street corner, you might think you know how to drink it, whether you’re a cream-and-three-sugars or straight-black coffee person. When it comes to iced coffee, however, most people are probably drinking it wrong.
We’ve all experienced the disappointment when the ice cubes melt and we end up drinking vaguely coffee-flavored water at the end of our drink. To get around this,make ice cubes out of coffee and enjoy a strong cup of cold joe all the way to the end.
Making Eggs
Considering how popular eggs are, making good ones should be easy as pie — although how easy pie really is to make is a question for another day. Still, everyone seems to struggle with getting eggs well cooked and perfectly round. It’s an eternal struggle.
Luckily, there’s a way to achieve culinary perfection without going out and buying a fancy kitchen tool. All you need is an onion! Slice your onion and use one of the rings to hold your egg while it’s cooking. You’ll have a perfectly-cooked, perfectly-round egg in no time.
Storing Ice Cream
Considering how much people eat ice cream, you’d think everyone would know how best to store it. But time and time again, people take ice cream out of the freezer only to realize that it’s hardened nearly past the point of no return.
To save ice cream from hardening in the freezer, keep the carton inside a large ziplock bag. It’ll keep the ice cream soft and easily scoopable so that you don’t have to struggle for it the next time you’re craving a frozen treat!
Microwaving Leftovers
This is truly a challenge for the ages. You get out your delicious leftovers and pop them in the microwave, but when you take them out, the edges are fiery hot while the middle still feels frozen! After years of trial and error, most people still struggle with this. Lucky, there’s a trick that can avoid this problem.
Just take out the middle! It sounds odd, but it makes sense. Arrange your food like a doughnut with a hole in the middle, and it will heat a lot more evenly. This is definitely a life hack to remember.
Using Bobby Pins
For anyone with long hair, bobby pins are a necessity. They’re needed to keep hair tucked securely in place so it doesn’t fall into your face (or food!) and ruin whatever it is you’re trying to do. However, you’re probably wearing them wrong.
It might feel natural to put them in your hair with the flat side down, but if you want them to stay in place longer, you should actually be wearing them wavy-side down. For such a common hair tool, they’re widely misunderstood.
Drying Nail Polish
Nail polish is one of those beauty items people just can’t seem to stay away from. For all that we use it, however, we still struggle with its slow-as-a-snail drying time. With all the YouTube videos and beauty hack tutorials available out there, it’s surprising that this trick isn’t more well known.
If you put your freshly-painted nails into ice water, they’ll dry super quickly. You’ll never be trapped by wet nails again, afraid to smear all of your hard work. You can go back to reading, typing on your computer or whatever else you need to do for the day.
Making a Sandwich
You would think that a sandwich would be one of the easier things to make in the kitchen. But like most people, you’ve probably been making sandwiches wrong your whole life. Think about it: you put on a couple of circular slices of meat on the bread, which leads to an overlap in the middle but no meat in the corners of the sandwich.
If you cut the circles of meat in half, you can align them to cover the corners of the bread and spread the meat more equally throughout the sandwich. Voilà: a perfect sandwich.
Sealing a Plastic Bag
Trying to keep food fresh can be a struggle when you have a bag that doesn’t come with a resealable zip. Take a bag of chocolate chips for example. Making sure that the chocolate stays fresh doesn’t need to be so hard.
If you have an old plastic bottle — such as a soda bottle — you can cut the top off and thread the food bag through the top. Fold the bag back over and screw on the lid to create a seal. The food will stay fresh for a long time.
Slicing Bread
Buying bread loaves with crust on top is a great way to add some flavor to whatever you’re going to use the bread for. When you’re cutting it, however, the crust can prove to be a bit of an obstacle, and the slices can end up lopsided and ugly.
To save your bread (and pride), there’s a trick that most people have likely missed. It’s simple: just flip the loaf upside down. The underside is a lot softer, so you can cut through it much more easily. This is the best kitchen hack since — well, you know.
Drinks on a Hot Day
Drinking a refreshing beverage on a hot day is an activity about as old as ice. It’s the perfect way to cool down and relax, but most people don’t know that they’re probably doing it all wrong.
Hot days mean there are a lot of bugs out and about, so you probably spend a fair bit of time swatting them away from your delicious drink. Rather than spend all that time and effort keeping them at bay, just put a cupcake wrapper over the top of your drink. You can even poke a hole for a straw.
Cutting Watermelon
Enjoying a delicious slice of watermelon on a warm summer day is about as traditional as you can get. Digging into that quintessential fruit is practically a summer rite of passage. But that’s actually not the best way to eat watermelon.
If you cut a watermelon like an onion instead of the way you usually cut it, it’s a lot easier to eat. You can munch down to the rind without worrying about getting it all over your face, which — while it might take out some of the fun — will definitely save you from a significant mess.
Breaking in Shoes
New shoes are always a little tight and uncomfortable, and it can take some time to break them in. Most people probably wear them for a few days and hope they don’t get too many blisters. However, there’s a much better way to break them in.
Wear some thick socks and grab a hairdryer. Put on your new shoes apply some heat to the parts of the shoes that are the least comfortable. The heat expands the fabric, and your shoes will break in a lot faster, bringing comfort much more quickly.
Drinking Soda
This is something most people have probably been doing since they were little kids. As simple as it is, however, you’ve probably been missing out on a critical part of the soda-drinking experience.
You know that little hole in the top of the can-opening bit of your soda? It can be used as a straw-holder! The next time you open a can of orange soda for a family barbeque or a rootbeer at a friend’s house, grab a straw and show off your newfound knowledge.
Using Toothpaste
Toothpaste is something you usually have on hand at all times. For something people use at least twice a day, you’d think everyone would be experts at applying toothpaste by now, but it turns out most people have been wasting toothpaste.
To make sure you don’t squander any precious breath-freshening product, use a bobby pin. Run the pin along the tube from the bottom to the top to squeeze out every drop, so no toothpaste ever goes to waste again.
Removing a Wine Stain
Spilling red wine is a tragedy. It is truly a laundry catastrophe of gargantuan proportions. While some people have tricks to get the stain out, others must resort to the usual scrub-until-it-comes-off method, which takes more time.
There’s a sneaky way to get red wine stains out quickly that might seem contradictory but works like a charm: use white wine. Fighting fire with fire, let some white wine soak into the red wine for a while before washing the stain. The mark will disappear like magic!
Cutting the Cake
Whether you’re cutting a cake or cutting up cookie dough, the go-to instrument is usually a knife. It makes the most sense to use, but sometimes it messes up the frosting or leaves a less-than-clean line in the dough, which is disappointing.
To keep dough lines and frosting clean, don’t use a knife. Instead, cut it with floss! It’s thinner than a knife but still sharp, so it’ll give you clean lines without messing up the beautiful decoration on top of the cake. It also cuts through dough easily, making it super convenient and fast to use.
Filling a Bucket
If you’ve ever had to fill a bucket with water without a hose nearby, you probably know it’s an annoying task. Buckets are too big to fit into the sink, so you usually end up filling it one sad cup of water at a time. Luckily, there’s a better way to fill it up.
As long as you have a dustpan, you’re all set. Simply set the dustpan in the sink at a right angle and turn on the water. The dustpan acts as a funnel, making the water run directly into the bucket.
S’Mores
You’re probably not eating them wrong per se. The classic graham cracker, marshmallow and chocolate combination is still one of the ultimate moments of summer (or winter, for those of us who do indoor s’mores in the oven). But these delicious treats deserve an update.
Try making s’mores with Oreo edges instead of graham crackers or Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups for the chocolate filling to bring these summertime desserts to the next level. Once you start shaking them up, you’ll never want to stop.
Eating TicTacs
Keeping your breath minty fresh with TicTacs is an easy way to counteract that garlic chicken you had for lunch. Most people don’t think about how they pour out a TicTac from its case, but there’s actually a very particular way to take one out most of us don’t know about.
To avoid accidentally pouring eight TicTacs into your hand when you only wanted one, use the built-in distributor that’s included in the lid of the TicTac box. Hold the case upside-down and open it slowly, and a single TicTac will fall onto the underside of the lid.
Cupcake Sandwich
Eating a cupcake, while definitely worth it, can be a bit of a mess sometimes. Frosting gets everywhere, and nobody ever seems sure of the best way to go about eating one. You almost need to unhinge your jaws for some sort of mega-bite to get the perfect ratio of frosting to cake.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. If you take off the bottom of the cupcake and squish it on top of the frosting to make a cupcake sandwich, eating the delicious treat becomes a million times easier. No mess — all deliciousness.
Eating an Apple
An apple is one of the most popular fruits. From keeping doctors away to acting as a great pie filling for pretty much all of human history, not too many fruits can compare. For all their popularity, however, we’ve been eating them wrong all our lives.
If you don’t slice it, you probably start eating an apple from the side, working your way around the fruit. That ends up wasting quite a bit of fruit, though, so consider eating one from either the top or bottom, to ensure you don’t let anything go to waste.
Taking Out the Trash
This, at least, should be something everyone knows how to do reasonably well. However, it turns out that even when it comes to the trash, there are still some things to learn. When you go to pull out a full trash bag, sometimes the bag fits the trash can so perfectly that it forms a seemingly airtight seal, making it impossible to take out.
If you drill small holes into the trash can, air can get in and make taking out the trash bag a much easier task. Once you’ve tried it, you’ll wonder why you never did it before.
Eating Cheesy Chips
From cheese balls to cheesy puffs and every kind of cheesy goodness in between, eating cheesy dust-covered chips is a delicious act that nearly everyone knows and loves. Even so, no one likes the clean-up that comes afterward — your hands are covered in cheese that never comes off.
Next time, instead of using your fingers, try eating the chips or cheese balls with chopsticks. It might look a little odd to the people around you, but you’ll have the last laugh when your hands are clean and ready for the next task while they’re still scrubbing away at the sink.
Hiding Written Mistakes
If you’ve ever written something out by hand, chances are you’ve also tried to cover up a mistake you made while writing it. Maybe you spelled something wrong or wrote the wrong word. Whatever the error was, you probably tried to cover it up by striking through the word or scribbling over it with some lines.
If you want to cover up your mistake, the trick is to write random letters on top of the word you want to cover up. It’s fairly easy to read through lined strikes, but writing random letters over the mistake makes it nearly illegible.
