Last year I travelled more than 240,000 kilometres on aeroplanes. I also packed a lot of suitcases, carry-on bags, and book bags in anticipation of those trips, occasionally hours or sometimes minutes before I headed to the airport.

I’m not sure I condone this hack, but since it’s Evil Week, let’s take a look at this DIY strategy to get out of paying extra airline bag fees.

Over the weekend, devastating fires in Northern California forced an estimated 200,000 people to evacuate—the single largest evacuation in Sonoma County in its history, the Washington Post writes. Meanwhile, just a few hundred kilometres south, the Getty Fire has already engulfed at least 200 hectares in the Los Angeles area and forced thousands of others to evacuate.

When it comes to flying, nobody wants to pay excess baggage fees. Unfortunately, fitting everything into one or two suitcases can be difficult; especially if you're going to be abroad for more than a week. With that in mind, here are eight space-saving hacks that will help you cram more into your allotted baggage allowances without breaking stuff in the process.

Moving is a long, arduous process. But it’s even worse when you arrive in your new home, open up a box, and find that your printer has shattered all the wine glasses it was packed with.

Video: Learn how to efficiently pack a suitcase, and maybe cry while you’re at it. This touching stop-motion short, based on a piece of flash fiction by author Ron Koertge, is about family and loss and how to fit everything into your luggage.

Look up "the best way to pack a suitcase," and you'll get at least half a dozen different answers. Some say you should roll your clothes, others recommend folding them, origami-like, into a bundle, while others swear by tools like packing cubes or compression bags. A recent trip gave me the opportunity to test out various packing strategies and determine the most efficient way to pack your clothes.

Occasionally, we all find ourselves in a position in which we need to pack a bunch of stuff — including clothes — into a backpack. It might be as simple as heading to a friend’s house for the weekend. Or packing your kid up for a weekend at grandma’s. Or — maybe your life is a little more exciting — you’re catching an early flight for an overnight bachelor party in another state.

Flying from somewhere very cold to somewhere very hot is the best kind of problem to have. (The reverse trip... less so.) But it also presents some logistical issues.

I have at least six different packing lists saved as notes on my iPhone: some for long weekends, others for emergencies, and one specifically meant for long flights.

We still don’t know what got us sick in Tokyo. But when four Lifehacker staffers travelled there together this month, three of us caught different bugs at different points. For me, that meant an upset stomach and diarrhoea that sent me to bed at 6 every night and made fine dining impossible. I had great luck with Tokyo’s plentiful public bathrooms. Much worse luck when I tried to buy stomach medicine.

I was a packing cube holdout for the longest time. Sure, people rave about them, and they are a classic travel hack.

“But what would they really do for me?” I wondered, as I tightly rolled my t-shirts and tossed them into my cavern of a suitcase. “I mean, it’s a whole extra layer of fabric, so it’s not like they save space,” I would speculate, as I dug to the bottom of my backpack looking for that flashlight I could have sworn I put near the top.

It’s great to have a packing list for real world items, to make sure you don’t forget your underwear or your toothbrush, but what about a digital packing list? Make sure you have these electronic essentials before you travel so an internet blip doesn’t leave you confused or stranded.

Last week I went to Tokyo. I got myself a windbreaker and I got my baby a pop-up book and a mobile. I got origami paper and tea and a Wi-Fi-enabled zoom-lens earwax picker. I bought trinkets for my friends — stickers, pins, a pop-up book, a bracelet, a squishy peach that looks like a butt. Of course I got a lot of snacks.

But I made sure I got socks. If you get socks everywhere you go, you’ll have a souvenir that sticks around for months or years.

Six years ago, my husband and I moved across the country from Arizona to the East Coast, where we’re both originally from. At the time, we had a two-year-old and an anxiety-ridden cat — not to mention furniture and belongings in the house we were renting, the condo we owned and a storage unit. It was a lot more complicated than when I moved to Arizona at 22 years old with only a carload full of stuff.

Ask my four-year-old to pack for a trip and, left to her own devices, she would bring her stuffed bunny, an Elsa dress, and four jelly beans. She needs a clear packing list, but she can't yet read.

The last thing I pack before a trip is my makeup bag. I'm always running behind, so I inevitably throw things in a bag in a panic and forget something I need, and take at least three things I don't. I have a couple of trips planned, but there are always road trips and weekends away that come up last minute, so it's good to have a bag on reserve ready to grab at a moment's notice, or at least have the travel-friendly products hashed out so I know what to take in a rush.

Moving never goes exactly as planned, no matter how prepared you think you might be. Movers arrive late, you run out of packing tape — or, like me, you drop and break your laptop because you didn’t realise it was sitting under a stack of clothes you’re hurriedly throwing in a box. Inevitably, you’ll forget something.

Dear Lifehacker, I'm moving soon, and I want to make sure my beloved computer makes the trip safely. I could trust the movers with it, but is that wise? What's the best way to move a computer and all my gear?