Smallist

I hate the concept of bag clips, because they’re the sort of thing that collect ominously in utensil drawers, and which you can never find when you need, and which adds about 5 seconds of inconvenience to an impulse activity. This bag-folding demo could end the reign of the clip.

Via Lifehacker.

By 2040, according to a study I just pulled from my ass, 95% of the web will be tips or lists, or lists of tips. So here’s my condensed top ten list of tips.

1. Exercise.
2. Eat five portions of vegetables a day.
3. Wait 30 minutes after the five portions of vegetables before exercising.
4. Save 10% of your income.
5. When posing for photos, put one leg in front of the other. It makes you look thinner.
6. Imagine the audience in their underwear.
7. Think about baseball. Or England, depending on your problem.
8. Don’t cross the streams.
9. Never get in a land war with Asia.
10. Be excellent to each other.

That should cover just about it. Am I missing anything?

You know how new PC’s come with a bunch of crap you don’t need? The PC Decrapifier removes it. Of course, one man’s crap is another man’s gold, so it’s courteous enough to show you a list of what it’s about to remove. Their list of crap is impressive. Not sure what Quicken 2006 is doing on there though… is it that bad a program?

Here are two bowls. Both are from Target, both are attractive, both are inexpensive. The one on the left holds four cups of cereal. The one on the right, which I believe was sold as a rice bowl, holds one cup of cereal. Guess what a serving size of cereal is? Yep, generally it’s about 3/4 cup, 150 cal. Assuming you don’t measure your cereal in the morning, and just fill to 3/4 of the bowl, switching bowls will save you about 450 calories a day, and make your box of cereal last four times as long.

Will you notice? Yeah, kind of, but not as much as you’d think. Because we determine that we’re full by visual cues. So if you can find an 8oz bowl, go for it. As for that little bowl, it was made by Zazen for Target, but they don’t seem to sell them anymore.

Elliott is trying to reduce his life to one bag. So far, the site looks very promising. For instance, he’s demonstrated the art of fitting dress shirts into a fedex envelope. Definitely one to watch.

Brian Oberkirch has had a “no mas” moment, and has decided to simplify his online life. To save you even more time, I’ve condensed his list to the bare essentials:

• Delete all newsreader feeds and start from scratch. (if you don’t have any newsreader feeds, do the same with your bookmarks)
• Check email where you put your hands on the steering wheel: 10, 2, and 4.
• Get rid of email notifications from social networking sites, remove self from email discussion groups, etc.
• Keep “IM office hours” rather than staying on all the time.
• No answering emails on sat/sun, one review per day.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to be available every minute to everyone. And from time to time, it’s good to clean up just about everything the way he handles feeds: take everything out of a desk, medicine cabinet, kitchen, and put back only what gets used often, relegating the rest to storage. Otherwise you end up like Katamari Damacy, accruing crap as you roll through life.

He also recommends the Four-hour Work Week, a new book by Timothy Ferriss. It looks a little Tony Robbins for my taste (and he’s NOT astronomy writer Timothy Ferris), but I enjoyed reading the title.

Via 43 Folders.

So I cleaned out my desk yesterday. These items were among the things within the mess. Notice the problem?

That’s right. Unless you’re running a kindergarten, you don’t need multiple scissors and tape. The screwdrivers are both phillips head, both the same size. I suppose the glue’s sort of excusable, since they’re different glues. Except, I’m a flash animator, and as we say in the trade, “If you’re using glue to animate Flash, you probably did something wrong.” They shouldn’t be in the desk at all. And it’s not just the desk: I know for a fact there’s two open Grey Poupons extant in the fridge.

There’s a catch-22 in play. The reason I have multiple items is that there’s so much clutter, I never remember what I have, or I can’t find something when I need it. So I buy another one. More clutter. And so on. It’s like heroin but without the weight loss. So from now on, three simple rules:

1. Supplies are to be kept in a separate area from active duty items. Always. No putting the new bag of disposable razors next to the nearly gone bag of disposable razors. It goes in a separate area. I went so far as to remove all but one pen from my top desk drawer. One day I’d like to use up a pen.
2. If it looks like I don’t have something, I will scour the apartment before buying another. Or resolve that, if I find the original at some point afterwards, I will give it away or sell it.
3. Most controversial: I will try to buy the highest quality items I can, so that I remember I have them. Obviously it didn’t work with the gray poupon, but imagine: if you had a red swingline stapler, would you misplace it?

On this last point I will make an exception for umbrellas, which will be lost no matter what.

Apartment therapy demonstrates how to use the space UNDER your kitchen cabinets.

Books are heavy. Bookshelves take up valuable wall space. And there are public libraries that will let you read anything in their collection for free. Hell, they’ll even let you take it home! So what the hell are you doing keeping these things? Now that we have the Internet, you probably don’t need them for reference, and if you have a yen to revisit the DaVinci Code in 2027, you can take your hover-car over to the library, or maybe even download it, and read it on e-ink. So here’s a way to thin your collection without feeling like you’ve given up anything valuable.

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In a comment to this post, Stephanie writes:

Did you check the pocketMod (http://www.pocketmod.com/). It’s a good way to reuse paper that’s already been printed on one side/
Don’t bother printing all the preset pages. Just create a white pocketMod template to know how to cut and fold it.
You get a wallet size booklet!

Well I tried it out and I’m happy to report it works great! The folding’s tricky at first, but it’s a great way to reuse paper, and you get to play with scissors. They have a bunch of strange little reference tables too, like a dvorak keyboard reference and a morse code chart.