Of my many flaws, one that should be easy to fix, is that I use too much of a product in single sitting: Lotion, shampoo, hot sauce—I always use a little bit more than I need to, thereby wasting some of it (excess lotion gets washed off), or having excessively spicy food.

The Tooth Fairy came up in our Offspring Facebook Group recently when one parent asked whether it was OK to skip the whole “A Fairy Brings You Money For Your Teeth” thing. In the course of the discussion, one parent had a great suggestion for trading teeth for money in a slightly non-traditional (but easier) way...

There’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to content these days. Countless podcasts, TV shows, newsletters, magazines, traditional media outlets, YouTube series, Instagram stories and more all vie for our attention, as well as our subscription dollars. While many of us would like to donate $5 a month or whatever other low figure the creators ask for, we often don’t or can’t.

This isn't so much a "tiny hack" - a tag we at Lifehacker use for simple tricks - so much as a "tiny pleasure." It's something that I do every day that makes me happy. It doesn't improve anything except the flavour of my mornings, and everyone should give it a shot. (That's an espresso pun right there.)

With a few clicks of your keyboard, you can find hundreds of opinions hashing out the best ways to live and be and do. Travel, spend money, invest, be productive, structure your day, listen to music, brine a turkey — there’s a right and a wrong way for everything, and god forbid you use the wrong credit card or incorrectly word an email given the breadth of resources at your disposal.

With so much information out there on how to optimise, well, everything, there’s just no excuse to do something in a way an expert deems substandard. What if you take a route not recommended by Google Maps and end up at your destination four minutes later than you would have if you followed the AI’s instructions? Quelle horreur.

Making plans with your friends, loved ones, and romantic partners should be a straightforward process, maybe even an enjoyable one. And yet, so many people are absolutely god awful it, muddying the waters with dithering, failure to grasp or account for basic details, poor communication skills, and sheer laziness.

I develop recipes for a living, which means my stovetop is basically always a disaster. Cleaning sucks, and even though I know it creates more work in the long run, I’ll find any excuse to avoid wiping oil spatters off my stove.

One of the great inconveniences of travelling to the USA is not being able to bring your liquids through security. After passing through the body scanner, you’re probably quite parched, and find the only options for liquid replenishment are an $8 bottle of “fancy” water, or a very low (and very low-pressure) water fountain outside the toilet.

Pringles - those stackable chips made from a slurry of wheat, rice, corn and potato flakes - can be a hassle to get out of the can. Especially since the company shrunk down its chips and stuck them in a smaller receptacle. The blaggards.

Whether you like to draw, paint, write, choreograph, or play music, you're probably familiar with the creative block, where you just can't seem to do anything despite your motivation. To escape that rut, try doing what you do best, only terribly.

If you're staying at a hotel in a busy city centre, light pollution can be a serious issue. Even the tiniest crack in your curtains could illuminate your room well beyond comfortable sleeping levels. So: Head to your closet.

After you do a few loads of laundry, the measuring cap for your detergent can get all gunked up and sticky. If you're tired of that, you can give it a thorough cleaning with your next load of laundry.

This might be one of the dorkiest memory tricks ever, but it works, so hey. Backstory: Every time I would use a curling iron, which was maybe once a month, I'd always have the exact same anxiety session about ten minutes after leaving my house. Did I unplug it?! My brain would begin a frantic quest to try to remember. OK, I think I did. No, I'm sure I did. I had to have, right? YES, I DID! ... But what if I didn't?! Commence flash visions of the next day's local newspaper featuring a photo my burned-down house and a very guilty-looking me (though my curls would be magnificent, admittedly).

I hate doing dishes more than any other chore but, due to my line of work and lack of dishwasher, I end up doing more than the average person. To overcome my utter disdain for donning dish gloves and standing in front of a sink, I motivate myself with a cocktail.

Apple, the good design company, bundles its Apple TV with a pitch-black and horizontally symmetrical remote. This means that if you can find the remote in the dark, you're likely to grab it by the wrong end, grasping the touchpad and clicking the wrong button. Thankfully you can fix that by attaching an ugly spot of colour to your remote.

Clicking a link in Apple's Safari app achieves one of two things: the new page temporarily takes over your iPhone while it loads, or you waste precious seconds long-pressing the link so you can load it in a background tab instead. As it turns out, there's a third option that's been hiding in iOS for almost a year, and it's even better.

If you always go to the same place to get your hair did because so-and-so knows how to make you look good, ask them for their phone number or email. They may not be styling at that spot for long.

The book The Nonverbal Advantage tells us that in the earliest days of human survival, the children who could maintain eye contact -- and therefore attract people's attention -- had the best chance of being fed and cared for.

Organic peanut butter is tasty stuff, and it can even be part of a healthy diet as long as you don't eat too much. But when you store it for a while (or in some cases, when you first buy it), the oils separate from the rest of the butter and rise to the top, which requires a vigorous stirring before you can spread the goodness. A quick flip can fix that.