5 Shortcuts to Simplify Your Life
Fix Your Hair in 3 Minutes
It's 5 p.m. at the office, you look as frazzled as you feel, and-surprise!-you (and your disheveled hair) are expected at a cocktail party starting in T minus 59 minutes.
Pull yourself together by working a silicone-based styling balm from the midsection to the ends of your hair, says Jimmy Paul, a New York City stylist. (We love Bumble and bumble Defrizz, $25.) "It gets rid of any frizz and immediately adds shine and definition to your style," he says. (Fine-haired types, apply the balm only to your ends, since silicone tends to weigh hair down.)
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Finish Errands in a Flash
Taking a left-hand turn on a busy two-way street can be a maddening time suck-minutes tick by as you sit, idling, with your blinker on. UPS drivers avoid this by taking right turns whenever possible. The company has developed a software program that maps out delivery routes using a majority of right turns-a move that last year helped save the company about 3 million gallons of fuel and shaved more than 28 million miles off their routes. UPS employees now use this trick on their off-hours and swear that it can trim at least a minute from each errand-and five errands an hour means five to 10 minutes' worth of saved time.
UPS spokesperson and confirmed right-turner Lynnette McIntire says she borrows yet another trick from the company's drivers, who are trained to put their key rings on their pinky finger when they exit the truck. "It saves me so much time," she says. "If you're carrying groceries, you don't have to dig in your purse for keys-they're right there on your little finger."
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Reduce Your Impact on the Environment
Zerofootprint.net gives you easy ways to reduce your impact on the global environment. (Unplug your cell phone charger once the phone has been charged! Buy apples from Washington or New York, not Fiji!) You can compare your carbon footprint to others' (by city or country), and hook up with like-minded people in your area (if you want to carpool or sponsor a farmers' market).
So take the O challenge and reduce your footprint by 10 percent. If 3 million readers succeed, we'll accomplish the environmental equivalent of planting and caring for 91 million tree seedlings for 10 years, or removing 690,000 cars from the road, or reducing the emissions of Liechtenstein 13 times over.
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Win Over a Baby
"Don't look at the child's face," says T. Berry Brazelton, MD, author of Touchpoints: Birth to Three and clinical professor emeritus of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Babies are hypersensitive communicators, he says: At three days old, infants recognize their mother's voice, and at two weeks, they prefer their father's face to other men's.
Everyone else has their work cut out for them. "Look to the child's side or over his shoulder," says Brazelton. "This way he won't feel overwhelmed." Allow the child to set the pace. He'll signal when he's ready to make friends by trying to get your attention-an infant will attempt to match your gaze, a slightly older baby will coo, a toddler will reach out for you or make funny faces.
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Build an Instant Home Library
For book lovers who want a more comprehensive library, publishers are making the process simpler. Amazon.com sells The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection, over 1,000 paperbacks dressed up in Penguin's recognizable black and orange bindings; it retails for $13,413 and weighs a mere 700 pounds.
Hardcover aficionados might prefer The Everyman's 100, a set of the bestselling titles at EverymansLibrary.com for $2,282; The Histories by Herodotus to The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. If you're more interested in modern masterpieces, Everyman's also offers the Contemporary Classics, 20th-century works for $4,015. "It's a great sampling of writers as varied as Toni Morrison and Vladimir Nabokov," says Roz Parr, who helped assemble both collections. "They're beautiful editions with curved bindings and ribbon markers-and surprisingly well priced given the production value."
We understand laying out thousands of dollars at once isn't always practical. Enter Harvard Classics, also known as The Legendary Five Foot Shelf of Knowledge. The titles-"all the books needed for a real education"-were selected by Charles W. Eliot, who was president of Harvard in 1910. Today, you can sign up at EastonPressBooks.com to receive one leather-bound volume from his list each month ($70).
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