From The Tips Box: Shopping Bags, Email Signatures

Readers offer their best tips for keeping yourself from forgetting your shopping bags, and a clever way to manage email signatures.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons — maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in — the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Avoid Losing Your Shopping Bags by Wrapping Them Around Your Leg

Photo by Paul Swansen.

Adam tells us how he keeps his shopping and takeout bags on him at all times:

When I go to the mall and go out to eat, or if I’ve gotten takeout, I will sometimes forget my bags at the restaurant when I leave, which is annoying at best. To avoid this, I’ve learned that if I just lean it up against my leg, or set it down and stick my foot through the handle, I won’t forget it when we get up to leave. It’s small, but can keep you from losing expensive things you just bought.

Store Common Email Templates as Signatures

Matthew shares a clever use for email signatures:

I have 20 e-mail signatures set up in my Mac outlook and only one of them is my signature. The rest of the signature slots have common e-mails, forms and instructions that I send out on a regular basis and many of them include graphics, PDFs and even audio snippets.

Note that the signatures are numbered to force the order in the signature preset list.

If you’re using Gmail, the Canned Responses lab also works well for this, as does text expansion. But this is nice because it works anywhere your email does.