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Lifehacker
Results for posts tagged "clutter" on Lifehacker Australia.
Blogger Leo Babauta found more free time in his days by decluttering his schedule and "designing" his life to include important stuff and exclude the rest. Lots of good, familiar advice here on managing distractions, your to-do list, and streamlining work to make more time for leisure.
You painted a room or two in your house, and now you've got a few half-full cans of paint left over. Save space and paint with home improvement guy Ron Hazelton's advice:
The key to paint storage is to minimize the amount of air in the container. So plastic water bottles of all different sizes are perfect for keeping leftover paint in good condition. Simply match the size of the bottle with the amount of leftover paint that you have. A roll of masking tape keeps the bottle from tipping and a paper towel will catch any drips. If the paint has a lot of loose debris, you may want to put a paint filter inside the funnel. Once the paint is in the bottle, remove the funnel and drop about six marbles into the paint.When it's time for a touch-up next year, you can shake up the bottle (and let those marbles do the work of mixing up the leftovers) and go. This technique will also save space in the garage.
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Weblog Apartment Therapy describes how to create a table of contents for your file cabinets to help make your filing system cleaner and easier to use. It's actually a very simple idea: You just print the different folder tab names of your file cabinet onto a piece of paper you can place on top of your cabinet to give you a quick overview of what's inside. The biggest hurdle to a clear, organised paper filing system is a lack of easy access, and Apartment Therapy's simple table of contents method attempts to remove one more boundary to easy filing. If you're serious about fixing up your filing cabinets, check out our extreme filing cabinet makeover.
At some point nearly everyone has had a collection of empty bottles and fast food containers riding shotgun with them. Take a few tips from Sue Brenner, a new contributor at the organizational blog Unclutterer, and have your car in order in no time. Her tips range from diving the car into quadrants and working systematically through them to sorting all the material you find into three bags.
Along with your trash and recycling bins, bring three grocery bags with you when you clean out your car. Label the first one "Does Not Belong Here." Write on the next one, "Give Away/Return," and label the final one, "Storage." Each bag will serve as a receptacle for the variety of things that found their way into your car. The "Does Not Belong Here" bag, for example, would be good for tossing in the spoons, client folders, and other items you want to keep but don't belong in your vehicle. Return these items to their homes after you've completed your car uncluttering project.
When my messy home office got so cluttered I couldn't get anything done in it, it was time to take action—and I turned to Lifehacker for advice. Disorganisation leads to lack of free time, lack of free time leads to believing you'll never be able to get it all under control again, and that is how I ended up as a terribly scattered person in a wretchedly cluttered office. The responsibilities of adulthood, marriage, and parenthood forced me to admit the haphazard approach to life that coloured my college years wasn't going to cut it anymore. In the following makeover confessional, check out the tips and tricks I gleaned from Lifehacker to transform my mountain of clutter into fuel for a productivity machine.
The folks over at the Unclutterer blog are on a war against toy clutter in the house that inevitably builds up with toddlers. They offer a few "duh!" alternative activities to commercial toys, like matching the socks in a freshly-done load of laundry, plus this great suggestion for a two-year-old:
Man, does she love to "paint" the sidewalk or fence with a paintbrush and small bucket of water. She can easily spend a half an hour painting and when she is done there is absolutely no mess to clean up.If you're looking for ways to entertain the kids this weekend, see our previously posted 10 ways to entertain young kids for $1 or less without the TV.
A London-based couple wanted easy ways to maximise the use of space in their small flat, and a built-in staircase-shaped bookcase does the job. This isn't a DIY project—an architect built it in, and it's a pretty steep climb, but the owner says she got used to it quickly. While this is more a gawk and drool wishlist scenario for most people's actual homes, you can always build yourself an attractive floating bookshelf on the cheap. For more neat book storage, hit the Web Urbanist link below.
Windows only: Donationware application Desktop Teleporter automatically moves files and folders from your desktop to user-defined folders to keep your desktop clean and neat. Desktop Teleporter is serious about keeping your desktop clean, moving any file that you don't add to the exclude list. If you want more advanced options and support beyond the desktop, check out Lifehacker's very own Belvedere. If all you want is a clean desktop and don't need more advanced options, Desktop Teleporter looks like a winner.
Keep your tools, craft supplies, or the kids' toys out of the way but within reach on a simple rack made of plywood and chicken wire. The Do Design DIY web site offers detailed instructions on how to put it together. The result is much more utilitarian than good-looking, so it's probably a better fit for your garage or the playroom closet—that is, out of sight but within reach. How do you keep the workshop clean but your tools accessible? Let us know in the comments.
Blogger Albert Alberts loves a slim wallet, and after reading over some of our wallet-slimming tips, he realised he had a powerful wallet-slimming tool in his pocket all the time: his iPhone. His idea? Rather than reducing his membership cards to just one club card, he scanned his membership cards to his computer, then synced them to his iPhone as an album called WalletCards. According to the post, his phone-friendly cards even scan successfully. You're still going to be at the mercy of whether or not the workers are willing to accept your scanned cards, but if they are, you can carry around all the membership cards you want without adding any bulk to your wallet.
