My Top 5 Life Hacks Tips for 2015

From a personal and business perspective, for me 2015 has been the year of the “life hack”. Per Wikipedia, life hacking refers to any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life.  In other words, being innovative and achieving better results, something which my team and I do every day for our clients.

Since January, I’ve been subscribing to lifehack.org and testing life hacks throughout the year. Some were awful, some were pretty good and some of them I now do most days.  They are personal – what might be incredibly useful for me may not work for someone else but in no particular order, here are my top five life hacks.

When ironing a button shirt, turn it inside out to easily iron over the button side.  Now while my wife had known this life hack for many years, it was completely new to me and in hindsight, very obvious. It has however reduced my weekly shirt ironing time in half.

 

 

When taking a photo, squinting your eyes will make your smile look much more genuine.  It seems strange so I tested this life hack on some friends and the squinty eye pics were chosen by everyone as being more genuine.   So start screwing up your eyes in those selfies.

Don’t burn yourself lighting hard to reach candles – light a stick of spaghetti and use that to light the wick instead.  Now while we have the odd scented candle, I mostly use this particular life hack to light my Egg barbeque which uses a mound of charcoal with a hard to reach firestarter at the base of it.

Who needs a tripod? Create a smartphone stand for hands-free video chatting or steady pictures by using an old cassette case. Obviously a vintage item like this can be hard to find, but an awesome retro cassette cover can also be a great conversation starter as I have found out this year – thanks to the Ramones. Who would have guessed they were so popular. For those of you wondering what a cassette is, this blog is not for you.

 

 

Create a chalkboard or whiteboard wall in your office using special paint. Now you’ll always have a place to jot stuff down. Obvious one but well worth doing. We have one above the photocopier that can be used anyone in the office to capture sudden “BFOs” (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) so they aren’t lost forever.

There were lots of other ones I still use and its worth scrolling through Lifehack.org just to see how creative and original people can be. Good luck life hacking!