Friday LifeHack

I thought, "I should make up my OWN clever name for "lifehacks", the term that came to wide recognition through Gina Trapani's "LifeHack.com" web site, but then I thought of an even more basic LifeHack: don't gratuitously invent terms for things for which there is already a well-known term, you make your information more difficult to understand. You wouldn't, except as a joke, say, "Please pass the NaCl dispenser", because by the time anyone figured it out, the food you had wanted to put salt on would already be cold. ("Salt shaker" or simply "salt", if you didn't get my cleverness, which was my intention to illustrate my point.) So there's your PRE-hack!

Today's LifeHack: Receipts.

These days you run from one place to another, buying stuff as you go along. Groceries, then maybe a latte, then a new router, then maybe lunch. By the time you get home, you've either lost all the receipts, or still have some or all of them in a undifferentiated blob in your pocket (or purse). Either you make a decision that you don't care, and just ditch them, or you have to go through them. After all, you probably don't need your grocery receipt, or the latte, but the router might just not work right and you might need the receipt to return it.

Is there any way to deal with this common yet unavoidable annoying task? I mean, it's just slips of paper, what is there to be done?

Not much, but this "not much" helps me a lot. See, whenever I buy something for which I receive a receipt, I make a judgment on the spot as to whether it's likely that I will ever need that receipt again. If it's the insignificant stuff like the latte or lunch, I figure, no, and I crumple them up into a ball. But if I buy that router, or maybe a shirt that might not fit, I FOLD that one neatly. They key thing is that you only have to think about that receipt that one time, rather than having to re-interpret everything. And the very appearance of something neatly folded seems to imply, "this is a valuable document", so it's easy to tell what means what. A deliberately crumpled piece of paper means "trash".

(Of course, if you're standing by a trash can when you get your latte receipt, just throw it away. But maybe you aren't, and maybe you aren't the kind of person that just throws crap on the ground because you RESPECT society.)

So now when I get home, I don't have to revisit the whole mess, look at them all again, and decide what to do. I just toss all the crumples, and put all the folded ones in a file, or with the item I bought. (If it's clothing, I'll just put it in the bag or even a pocket; if the thing came in a box, I tape the receipt to the top so I don't have to search for it.

Not only does this make handling receipts much easier, but it increases the likelihood that you will be able to come up with a receipt to return something should you ever need to.

Voila...my receipt LifeHack. I hope it helps you.