Tiny Triumphs

Sites online have posts about the genius trick that ... . Mostly they aren’t genius, a label much misused, but that started me thinking about small changes in what you do that are clear improvements, typically when you realize that what you were doing was stupid.

For example:

We used to keep the butter dish in the refrigerator, making the butter too hard to spread; now we keep it, covered, on the table. Butter at room temperature doesn’t tear the bread, does spread. It can sit at room temperature a long time before it goes rancid and ours never has; before that happens we have used it up and put in a fresh stick.

A second example occurred to me this morning. I used to keep a pair of swimming goggles for onion chopping in a drawer in the kitchen; in recent years my wife and daughter have done most of the cooking so I only just discovered that they were no longer there. I have just chopped a pound of onions. When my eyes recover I will go back downstairs to chop another pound. I should buy another pair of goggles.

Another. The freezer compartment of our refrigerator develops, for mysterious reasons, little hills of ice under where the ice cube trays go. They can be removed by putting a wet sponge in the microwave for fifteen seconds or so then putting it on the ice to melt it. That is probably safer, at least for the refrigerator, than my previous solution of assaulting the hill with a chisel, which also worked. I have resisted the temptation to try my miniature blowtorch. So far,

Yet another. My wife and daughter keep a traditional Lenten fast. One year it occurred to me that abstaining from something temporarily might be a useful custom. While they abstained from meat and milk I abstained from arguing climate change issues on Facebook and never went back to it. I had concluded earlier that practically nobody on either side of the argument understood how greenhouse gas warming worked; they thought of CO₂ as an insulator, a blanket. It apparently had not occurred to them that an insulator would block heat coming in from the sun as well as out from the Earth. It had not occurred to me that arguing with those people was a waste of time. Until I tried stopping.

That example will apply to few other people but the underlying tactic generalizes: Commit yourself to doing without something for a fixed length of time to see if you are better off without it. For some it might be alcohol or marijuana, for others Tinder. If you want to respect tradition, abstain from Ash Wednesday until just before Easter.¹

Another thing I committed myself to some time back was intermittent fasting, sixteen hours between the last food of one day and the first food of the next. I started doing it because it was claimed to have a variety of health benefits. I still do not know if the claims are true; a sample size of one does not produce much reliable information. But it makes it much easier to keep down to my desired weight because for much of the time I could be nibbling I can’t be.

I put a query up on my favorite web forum to find other examples. Here is one:

I started cooking spaghetti in a wide frying pan rather than a pot and I think it works...pretty well! An inch or so of water boils faster than a pot of water, with less water you get very starchy water great for sauces, and you don’t have to do the “squish down the half cooked pasta” dance or break it in half like a savage. I just picked up the cheapest not coated with anything frying pan I could find at a thrift store for like five bucks that was wide enough and it’s now become my pasta boiling pan.

Another poster decided to abstain from digital devices for the first two hours of the day six days a week, all day for the seventh.

Another offered the following, which I plan to imitate:

I used to get a flu shot every September, when the media and my doctor’s office started hounding me to. Now I watch flu levels in my state on the CDC map, and get the shot when flu levels in my state move from the “Minimal” category to “Low.” It takes 2 weeks from the shot for the benefit to kick in, and protection then deteriorates at a rate of about 10% a month. Timing the shot the way I do matches my period of maximum immunity to the flu peak. (And in the last 5 years my system has had me getting the shot no earlier than mid-November.)

Another offered for his example a policy of always keeping a spare roll of toilet paper within reach of the toilet, in case the current roll ran out.

I thought everyone already did that, but perhaps not.

Yet another pointed me at an entertaining video about how to tie your shoes, tying the bow as a square knot instead of a granny.

Another:

To solve the frequent problem of “where are my keys / my phone?”, I have a place on my working desk dedicated for this purpose. My keys and phone can either be at that place, or in my pocket, so I can find them instantly.

I should try that. As soon as I find them.

Also:

I made a checklist for packing for a vacation. It is incredibly useful and saves me a lot of stress. Making the checklist was trivial: first I wrote the obvious things, and then after every vacation I added the things I wished I had taken. After three vacations the list was complete.

I have several such packing lists for different sorts of trips; the one for Pennsic is the longest. The part I don’t do and should is modifying the list after I get home.

Here is one more of mine, described in an earlier post.

Emptying and refilling ice cube trays requires about ten minutes that could be spent doing something more entertaining such as reading a good book or arguing with people online. If I do it the benefit is shared with my son and daughter, if one of them does it the benefit is shared with me (my wife doesn’t have a taste for iced drinks). There is a temptation for each of us to refrain from emptying the trays into the bin until we absolutely have to in the hope that one of the others will do it instead.

That is a public good problem.

One solution would be to convert the public good to three private goods, three sets of ice cube trays and three bins, one for each for each of us, but space in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator is a scarce resource and we don’t have room for three refrigerators. Another solution would be to charge each of us for each ice cube used, paying the money to whomever emptied the trays, with the price adjusted until quantity supplied equaled quantity demanded. But … transaction costs.

The solution I found was to convert the public good problem into a competitive game. A sheet of paper on the refrigerator keeps track of how many times each of us has emptied the ice cube trays and we compete to stay ahead. That is why, if you happened to be in the kitchen at the right time, you might hear my son saying “Dibs on the ice cubes” or my daughter, having noticed that I have the bin out to refill it, complaining that she was about to do so.

That particular idea is unlikely to be useful to many people but, again, the approach of which it is an example might be.

I am not the first person to think of collecting such tricks; the conventional label is “life hacks” but I like mine better. Judging from what I found with a quick google on “life hack,” the word “genius” before a list of such signals that the contents will not be.

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1. Strictly speaking not including Sundays but I ignored that.