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What are some of your "life hacks" you use regularly?
These could be active skills or techniques you've found helpful, things you've built or bought that have changed an area of your life, or just something that brings you more joy than you had before.
A few subject areas that could spark ideas (but please share things outside of these if you have them!):
- Work / Professional Life / Networking
- Cooking / Baking / Food Prep
- Cleaning
- DIY
- Crafts / Hobbies
- Home Automation / Security
- Beauty / Grooming / Personal Hygiene
- Travel
- Planning / Scheduling / Memory Aids
- Fitness
- Relaxation
- Mental Health
My biggest life hack is a five year plan.
My second biggest life hack is to always say yes even if I am feeling lazy, or to say no even if I will feel bad.
I write down what I want to have achieved in five years. Things like travel to Europe, go to burning man, ride a motorcycle, buy a house, start a business, learn to sail. The point isn't to force myself to do these things. The point is to think about what I want to do, and think about what small things I can do in the next year that will start me on that journey. Things like buy a travel book (this was decades ago), research burning man, schedule lessons, buy books on house inspections, create a website, read about sailing.
A friend said a mutual acquaintance once commented that the one thing he was impressed by me, was that I was always off doing cool shit (at the time I was learning to fire dance.) It's not because I am cool. It is because I have a five year plan, that becomes a list of small things to do that year.
As for the second life hack, I am not sure how to say this. I will always try to tell friends and family yes to anything that gets me outside of the house, even if I am tired and would rather sit inside on a digital device. If a friend wants to go party but I just want to chill and watch a movie? Yes, lets party. If my son wants to cook Butter Chicken tonight? Yes. Lets go buy the ingredients from the local Fijian store. On the other hand, if the only thing that is stopping me from saying no is a feeling of guilt, the answer is always No. No, I will not talk to you about Jesus/ my electricity bill. No I will not do your job, or no I can't give you both what you want (quality) and also by when you want it (time), pick one.
Little things:
Clothes: One style of socks only. Slip on shoes.
Travel: My dopp kit is always ready to go and continually evolves. Over the years I added eye mask, ear plugs, bottle openers.
Car: Contains a portable jump starter and portable tire inflator, plus a rag to check the oil, and water bottles.
Tech: Did you turn it off and turn it on again? Lets try that one more time while I watch you do it...
Quality of life: Audio books while driving, doing chores, mountain biking in the hills.
Edit: Calendar reminders with automatic emails! I get emailed weeks before I need to start thinking about someones birthday! Timers for shorter term things like remembering the pot is on the boil or clothes are done in the washer.
In another lifetime I read an essay? agony aunt? by Dan Savage about saying yes to things proposed by a partner. The acronym he used was GGG, and while I don’t remember the other Gs, the last one is game, as in “I’m game,” à la your just saying yes. His argument was basically that being game makes you a generous, giving, good partner (two of the other Gs perhaps?) I try to incorporate that into all my relationships, and it’s made me a better friend (and lover).
Yep, good/giving/game!
Not only one kind of socks, but one kind of underwear, undershirts, jeans. When they are worn out, replace the whole batch with all new, so I never have a mix of old and new.
Also, if you fold your socks, stop folding your socks. Why are you folding your socks? Just stop. You will save yourself dozens of minutes a year.
Ok but alternatively. Balling my socks keeps pairs together. And while I almost exclusively have interchangeable socks (I don't care if one has a pink puma and the other has a blue one. ) having only one sock clean left is a disaster. Balled socks survive.
I'm with @bashcrandiboot in that I don't fold or ball my socks. But it's really because i'm sort of a clean-laundry-basket-to-dirty-laundry-basket kind of person. Dresser drawers represent a fantasy where I have time to fold and put away all my laundry, not just the socks.
Re: socks of different colors:
~Steven Wright
Oh for sure if the socks are in the basket they're just living their best life.
And fwiw the socks are the same color. I buy a multi pack, but they like to come with different colored logos. And then sometimes they change the design up just slightly so none of them match.
But they're ankle socks so it doesn't matter.
Hate to break it to ya, chief, but you sound pretty cool to me. Sorry you had to find out this way but your five year plan thing sounds cool AF.
Yes! No more fumbling to match socks or to tie laces. I'm with you on this one.
Question about five year plan: one plan at a time or is there a series of on-going overlapping ones?
Yes/No : that's an impressive level of discernment and willpower
Overall I'm just very impressed by the amount of functioning you possess
The plan is just a set of bullets in a word doc.
Here is part of the plan from 2003...
• Live in Europe (not done, visited in 2009)
• Learn to surf in Hawaii (done)
• Learn to motorcycle (done)
• Learn to golf (done)
• Write a childrens book (not done)
There is just one current plan. I have copies of old plans. I create a new plan every 3-5 years.
I am not as functional as I might sound. I am looking at my plan right now and realize I need to book a fun international trip, because that has been on my plan for five years and still hasn't happened yet.
If you find zoom 1-1 zoom meetings stressful, make the window smaller on the screen. If you were meeting in person, the person you're talking to would be at least 5-6 feet away. But when their face is giant on the screen, that's basically the equivalent of sitting nose to nose with them, which most of us find deeply uncomfortable.
Also, once you're sure your camera is set correctly, turn off your own zoom image or cover it with a sticky note if you don't have that option. We can't normally see ourselves, so it just makes us self conscious. Whatever things you normally do would be fine in an in-person meeting when you can't see yourself.
Agreed! I also do that, and position the person's face as close as possible to my webcam, to make the eye contact more plausible.
My #1 life hack is the good old coin toss.
Want to make a decision you don't care about?
Toss a coin!
Want to settle an argument that just needs some reason to end?
Toss a coin!
Want to lightly deceive your companions to have your way?
Carry a conspicuously abnormal coin and toss it! "Yup, that's heads."
Want to make a significant decision but can't quite tell which way to go?
Toss a coin, and you'll know!
Want to look like Doc Holliday, but lack the dexterity?
Toss a coin to save face!
What can't it do?
Something I read about the coin toss is that when you make the coin toss, you'll either be happy or disappointed with the outcome, and that helps you know which thing you really wanted.
That's my life hack - flip the coin and pause before you look at it. Feel which outcome you're rooting for. Then don't even look at the coin and just do that one.
Ha, we use the coin toss as a barrier to stop ourselves being lazy sometimes. We both want to order food in at the end of a long day? Well hard biscuits, we only get takeout if we toss Heads. I find it easier to "obey" a lost coin toss than just say no to myself.
Yea I use it when the decision seem to be almost tied - when both choices seem to have some advantages and some disadvantages and I don't strongly prefer either - coin toss it is. Then I condition myself to do it even sooner in the decision process next time, so I save even more mental energy.
I do this a lot with the decision coin from Random.org’s app. I have it toss 5 coins for me, best of five wins.
I use this when my wife needs to make a decision - like buying this or that color nail polish. The outcome of the toss doesn't actually matter that much, as it just sets mental state for what she really wants, she either agress to the outcome or opposes and thus overrides it - just like @first-must-burn commented; it just makes her choose right at that moment.
I like to be fancy and use D20 dice. One representing each choice and a minimum toss of 3 (usually 5 because it's fun). I'll mostly go with the choice that rolled a crit 20 😁
Just like coin toss, it'll give me a clearer idea on whether I want to go with the results.
I used to do the coin toss occasionally when i was a crewboss. If I had a particularly gnarly task to allocate and 2 people were available where there was really no tipping factor to choose between, I'd have them call a coin toss for it.
I'd try to balance out the less pleasant tasks later on anyway, but in the moment, it made it easier for everyone to leave it to fate.
This is less what I'd call a "life hack," and more a strategy to approach a class of purchasing scenarios.
About a decade ago, I decided to transition careers into electronics repair (really it was more choosing *a* career rather than transitioning from one to another, but I digress). I didn't really get any guidance from people more experienced in the field, but was instead just kinda of tossed in at the deep end to figure out how to swim on my own.
One particular challenge for me was in figuring out how to build out a toolkit without wasting money on gimmicky tools that sound like great ideas in the sales pitch, but end up being useless or flimsy, or any of the myriad other ways a tool can be a waste of time and resources. I was not financially comfortable by any stretch of the imagination, and simply did not have the resources to lay out more than I absolutely had to in order to do the job, so I was keen to maximize the value of my tool purchases.
So, say some tool or gizmo has caught your eye that you think might help you tackle a type of problem, but you don't know whether it's worthwhile to spring for the expensive, "professional grade" brand, or even whether there actually is a difference between brands with big marketing budgets and the cheap labels you find in the clearance bins by the hardware store registers. The strategy is a little counter-intuitive: buy the cheapest, shittiest version of that tool you can find, at least for the initial purchase. I mean go for the cheesiest, Temu-iest entry in the product category your search leads you to, and then use that until the handle falls off.
It ends up playing out like this: either a.) the tool is conceptually flawed and does not save time or effort, and so you've probably learned something about the entire product category; b.) you find a lot of uses for the tool and you wear it out, in which case you now have a good understanding of what features you want from a replacement and where the most likely points of failure are, and are now well-situated to make informed purchasing decisions; or c.) you use the tool a lot and the cheapo version doesn't wear out, and is essentially every bit as functional as an expensive version would be for a fraction of the cost.
After consciously adopting this strategy, I've realized some surprising things about my tools: oddly, the tools I use the most, the workhorses of my kit, tend to be the tools I've spent the least amount of money on, relatively speaking. In many cases, I've never needed nor felt the desire to replace the cheesy cheapo first purchase. The two or three primary screwdrivers I use day-in, day-out all came from the same $5 set of 10 screwdrivers I bought nearly a decade ago on Amazon, and they barely show any signs of wear despite years of constant use.
The more expensive, specialty tools I've purchased have tended to do the job as advertised, but are so limited in their applicability that even the cheesiest brand holds up for quite a while. When they do give out, it's about an even split whether I even bother to get a replacement, and when I do, about even odds again whether I spring for an upgrade. At that point, no matter what I choose, I know I'm deciding from a place of knowledge and experience, and that's usually worth the price of admission.
It's fair to say that this "strategy" is essentially just how people with limited resources have always gone about shopping for durable, useful goods out of necessity, but I've found that consciously adopting it as a strategy rather than an imposition of circumstance has helped focus my decision-making process, as well as moderate my impulse to buy random stuff, so I thought I'd share it here.
Adam Savage is a proponent of this purchasing strategy, so you're in good company.
Hell, it might've been him I cribbed it from. It's also just as likely I did it out of necessity and just backformed the rationale to make myself feel clever.
Wherever it came from, it works a treat.
That sounds like a strategy I will adopt. A little while ago I got a set of temu-grade craft pliers, and although they feel bad in my hands, they indeed get the job done until another few months later.
Caveat: Does this maybe don't apply to tools requiring high precision, eg, jewelry/mechanical watchmaking level stuff? But a hobby like that isn't for the faint of heart or thin of wallet to begin with. So maybe it simply scales to buying cheapest barely acceptable trade grade instead of Swiss made highest quality right away.
You can also go too far with it if you aren't careful. I have found myself putting up with awful tools for far too long, just because the disposable trial tool stubbornly refused to die. Don't underestimate the value of a tool feeling good to use, especially if it's one you use a lot.
Perhaps the most unconventional example I have is automating Microsoft Teams activity and notifications for work. My current job activity has more slow periods than busy ones, and for some reason the MS Teams app on my phone does not notify me when a new chat message comes in. So I over-engineered a solution, and am self-hosting a container that spins up Firefox, opens Teams web, and runs two separate user scripts. One keeps me appearing as active (simulates mouse movement). The other that I built out myself will monitor areas of the web page that change when a message comes in, and send my phone a notification via Gotify, another service I'm running. This has been a game changer since I work from home. I no longer feel glued to my computer (with the exception of meetings and busy/crunch times). Having some extra time to do laundry or other tasks is very beneficial in a lot of ways, including for my mental health, as I'm not stressing over always watching for messages.
Another thing that I use multiple times a week is a digital recipe book (we use Mealie). Having a central place to decide what to cook for the week and generate a grocery list is a huge help for getting our family through a task we admittedly do not like very much. Associated with this is grocery pickup, which we utilize for free with Walmart. Not having to traverse the store aisles, fight for parking, or face constant temptation from end cap items has changed our life for the better. Both of these have made us healthier through easily enabling more cooking at home.
The headphones I use for working have a feature where they turn themselves off automatically if you take them off for too long. Since the passive sound isolation is pretty good, sometimes I won't notice until I join a zoom meeting and look like an idiot from 2018 who has never used Zoom because I can't hear anything.
So I vibe coded a service for my linux computer that looks for new zoom windows and then pops up a notification if my headphones are not connected. There are still reasons I look like an idiot, but I've pruned the tree by one.
Programmatic reminders are indeed quite valuable.
I have a shortcut set up on my phone that asks me if I want to disable the "send unknown callers to voicemail" setting when I open a rideshare app. Just in case they call me when I'm waiting for them to arrive.
Even non-programmatically: I use the standard reminders app for recurring tasks I need to do daily, every few days, etc. Being able to snooze them for an hour is nice as well.
And even doing "manual programming" of your brain: whenever I remove oven mitts, I immediately check if I need to turn off the oven and do so.
This teams container (I am thinking to repurpose for slack) sounds very helpful. I frequently stay glued to my computer just to stay “online” even if I’ve already worked a full day in the off hours.
Is this something you’d be willing to share?
Sure, so I'll give a quick overview and feel free to ask more.
For the container, I'm running Neko which is just a browser bundled with a browser-accessible VNC server.
For the browser in the container, I'm running Firefox with the tampermonkey extension. I am using a user script in tampermonkey I found online that just simulates activity- mine is teams "specific" but might be generic enough to work for slack too.
For the custom notifications, I'm using a custom user script that makes REST calls that push Gotify messages to my phone. You can ignore this part if your slack mobile notifications are reliable.
That’s much less convoluted than I was imagining and sounds reasonably maintainable.
Thanks for sharing!
I have one hack as a gamer: Play one big game at a time. This makes you not to hop between many games and thus many controls schemes, stories, genres... You can focus on this one game, master its controls, know the story well, live through it. You don't put the game down until you finish it or decides to put it away forever/be ok to start over next time in (for example) a fee years.
I do this since I bought Switch Lite in 2019 and I do this with Steam Deck. I finished so many games that I have even.played before but put down...
I still have skme sidekicks for when I need put down the big game for a day or two just to hink about something else for a moment. These sidekicks are easy no-brainers like American Truck Simulator, Carmageddon or a day/or even just one skirmish of Age of Empires 2. Something that doesn't need thinking about story or learning new controls set so.it doesn't interfere with the main game.
I'm going through my backlog effectively but very slowly with 2-5 games a year. But I finally finish them!
This is the only reason I kinda sorta miss individual game cds. The physical act of taking out a game, putting it back in the case, then getting another game and putting it in your pc/console served as a mental threshold between games that basically said "okay this one is done now, time to move on to this new one". Nowadays it's just too easy and convenient to just exit one game and click one button and now you're in a whole different game. Repeat ad nauseam.
That definitely is part of the "problem". Also when you had 4GB harddrive of which 0.5-1GB was OS and another 0.5-1GB for a game ypu didn't have that much to choose from.
And then there was Baldur's Gate with its 4 CDs (base game, if I recall correctly)bwhich you had to swap out as you traveled through the locations. Different times these were.
Nowadays you just click download and then (in my case) wait for 10+ hours instead of installing the game quickly from the disc. Why didn't PC gaming pick up on Blu rays? I guess it was too late with broadband internet already running at the time.
That definitely is part of the "problem". Also when you had 4GB harddrive of which 0.5-1GB was OS and another 0.5-1GB for a game ypu didn't have that much to choose from.
And then there was Baldur's Gate with its 4 CDs (base game, if I recall correctly)bwhich you had to swap out as you traveled through the locations. Different times these were.
Nowadays you just click download and then (in my case) wait for 10+ hours instead of installing the game quickly from the disc. Why didn't PC gaming pick up on Blu rays? I guess it was too late with broadband internet already running at the time.
A few that I use that I’ve never seen mentioned before in a life hack thread and use weekly:
If you want soft cookies or your cookies have gotten hard over time throw a piece of bread in the container. The cookies steal the moisture from the bread and have the perfect level of softness.
If you are opening a canned food item that retains its shape (refined beans for example) don’t waste time scooping it out with a spoon.
If you flip it upside down and use the can opener on the bottom as well the food item will slide out completely on its own after you puncture it.
This sometimes works too even if the top is a pull tab as long as the bottom of the metal isn’t too thick for the can opener to penetrate.
I forgot exactly where I saw it (probably a YouTube video) but I think marshmallows might work for this purpose too and could be even better than bread because they don’t go bad nearly as quickly so you can leave them in there for much longer. I think the original hack I saw was for brown sugar rather than cookies, but I think the principle was the same (moisture wicking basically).
Paper towel, fold a couple times, cut 2*4 cm of it, tape it to the top of the brown sugar jar like this:
Slightly moisten paper towel and viola. Re-moisten every now and then. It doesn't have to be perishable food stuffs for the humidifying effect.
Also stale bread can be revived by lightly moistening paper towel, lay it on slice, microwave for 5-10 seconds. Pizza also revives to about 50% of its glory. 100% from cast iron pan and sprinkling of water on cheese side + lid
I've tried the pizza on cast iron thing and can vouch for how great it is! I'll have to test out that stale bread in the microwave one, thanks!
I'm sorry, I don't understand the paper towel in the sugar jar thing (the configuration of it, but also the reasoning). Are you sticking it to the lid like a stamp, and then moistening it? Is that good for sugar? My instincts would have been to keep water away from any foodstuffs I'm storing like this, but I have no good reason for why, just a mental Gallic shrug.
The reason behind it is the same as those ceramic coins they sell to keep brown sugar moist, and why people also had slice of apple or marshmallows but cleaner: brown sugar naturally contains moisture. Too much moisture and they dissolve then dehydrate back into one Crystal sure, but too little moisture and brown sugar becomes hard and clumpy as well. Same with baked cookies, they need some moisture but not too much.
What I do with the moist paper towel is to keep the inside of the jar humid, without paper towel coming into physical contact with the sugar. Instead of tape, I suppose it can be held up using two magnets or hot glued to the lid as well.
My brown sugar is hard and clumpy!!! I thought that was just what brown sugar did, since we don't get through too much of it in recipes. I'd resigned myself to chipping off sugar with a chisel every time I wanted some, and then crushing the lumps into pieces. Amazing, thank you!
I see what you mean about the paper towel too now, nice one.
I forget where I learned it, and whether or not it’s common knowledge, but I get a surprising amount of use out of a simple procedure for solving ratios/proportions/unit conversions. It’s useful for modifying ingredient amounts in recipes on the fly, and basically anything else that involves scaling.
Say you have a ratio like this:
You can quickly solve for X by multiplying the 2 numbers it’s adjacent to: 4 * 6, then dividing the product by the number opposite X: (4 * 6) / 8 = 3.
X can be in any of the 4 positions and the method will still work—the above equation would work out the same as any of these reflections of it (this is just a few examples out of many more):
This is called Cross-multiplication. It came up in Advent of Code at one time as well.
I love this one and use it often.
I learned it in a really low math class in college (think elementary school level) and was surprised that in higher level classes they teach a more difficult way to do this and this isn’t common. Most people don’t know how to do it this way.
I can’t even remember the more difficult option because I refused to switch.
Like @DataWraith said, that's cross-multiplication. Very useful. And knowing that, unless one is a zero, you can freely swap pairs of numbers along the diagonals (i.e., the reflections as your call them) comes in very handy.
Thinking of ratios like this me of another trick that I've found very useful: the "railroad track" notation for dimensional analysis. Let's say we want to convert 30 mph to m/s, but we don't know the direct conversion. Maybe we know how many feet to a meter, seconds to an hour, feet to a mile and so forth. We could write it out like this:
The idea is that when you see a unit on top and a unit on bottom, they cancel and you can cross them both off. In this case, we start with our 30mph, and then tack on individual conversions until everything cancels but meters on top and seconds on bottom. Knowing that we need to cancel tells us which units in a ratio need to go on top, and which ones need to go on the bottom. (I.e., do we need to multiply by 5280 feet/mile, or 1/5280 miles/foot? It's the former, because we want to cancel the miles in the 30 mph.) Multiply everything on top and divide that by everything on the bottom and you've got your result.
Besides unit conversion, it's also useful for checking that you get the right kinds of units out of other formulas. Let's say we want to know velocity after 5 seconds of free-fall at the usual gravitational acceleration on Earth of 9.8 m/s^2:
Here, the seconds on top cancels one of the seconds on the bottom (the square), leaving us with m/s, which is the correct unit for velocity. So the units check, and we can be reasonably sure our math is consistent.
Kind of a pedantic point, but it's worth keeping in mind that this trick only works if the function is linear. (And not merely affine; that is, the function should be like
y = a xwith the originb = 0preserved.) So you can't use this trick to convert degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius (f = c *1.8 + 32), for example.Definitely! But I'm always surprised at just how many things can be expressed through just multiplication and division like this. F = G m_1 m_2 / r^2, for gravitational force for example. Or E = m c^2.
I started showering before bed when I worked in the medical field and had to, but I kept doing it even though I work from home on a computer all day because of the routine.
Showering and brushing teeth isn’t something I have to think about, its part of my bed time routine. I know that it takes 20 mins to do, and so then I know I have to start the routine before I actually want to be in bed and this also enforces a bed time.
On the outside I look really put together but really my entire life is just a series of routines like this.
I have longer hair and whenever I do that I either have to spend 20 extra minutes drying my hair before going to bed (it’s noisy) or go to sleep with wet hair.
Either way, I wake up with messed up hair that I can’t tame in the morning, and that doesn’t look as sleek and shiny as when showering in the morning.
Have you experienced that? Any tips?
My hair is the total opposite. Its super humid and frizzy when I get out of the shower and don’t blow dry it, but when I sleep on it, it calms down.
I shampoo and condition it every night. I use a 2 in 1 shampoo so it doesn’t dry my hair out too much and then I rinse and run a dab of conditioner through it and let that sit while In wash the rest of my body and shave. Then, I rinse that out too. I don’t leave any product in my hair, ever, Ive never even colored it. I comb it before I go to bed and again in the morning. When I wake up I spend a good bit in the morning running my hands through my hair to spread out the little bit of natural oils I built up while I was sleeping, and that gives it a nice sleek shine. Like I’ll do that once before I dress, again while waiting on coffee, again while I change into street clothes, once more before I leave the house for good measure, and probably a lot of times in between that. I’m always running my hands through my hair.
I have really thick slightly curly hair and its always a little bit of a mess no matter what I do so some of this might just be me caring about it less than you do. Its always a little bit frizzy cause I live in a warm humid climate but its 100000% worse if I shower in the morning and let it air dry.
I clip my hair up so it's not wet when Im not washing. Also too frequent shampoo-ing irritates the scalp which causes dandruff for some, ironically.
The kindle app on my phone allows me to read in bed in the dark while partner sleeps.
My first job in high-school was a kitchen at a summer camp. I learned knife technique to chop quickly and safely, and I also learned hacks to chop vegetables efficiently. For example I cut lettuce for salad with a few geometric cuts. It doesn't turn out pretty but it's quick to do.
I could certainly benefit from learning knife techniques. It's one of those things I find hard to invest time into to because I don't enjoy cooking. But it would probably make me hate cooking less if I learned a bit.
For a few years now I've started my days with a goal of doing just 3 things. These 3 things are usually, but not always, trivial. Like if I knuckled down and just knocked them out I'd be done in 15min or less. But the snowball effect of only committing to doing 3 things and then getting them done almost always gets me motivated to do more. Today for example, one of the things I committed to was just loading up the silverware in the dishwasher. Not rising things off, not fully loading and starting it, not hand washing pots and pans, just getting knives and forks in. But after getting that done it wasn't much more work to do plates and bowls, then before you know it there are only dirty pots and pans on the counter, so you wash those and dam if the kitchen isn't half way clean.
It doesn't always work. There are plenty of times I'd just throw silverware in then walk away. And that's OK. I think to really get this to work you have to be serious that these 3 things are all you have to do. Sometimes you do more, sometimes that's it. But for me at least most days just getting those small wins turned into a lot more.
That's a big win.
My main dysfunction is from two sources:
I'm an older adult now but still experience "you can't tell me what to do" like I were 14 in my own head.
And then for days I can't do anything unless severely pushed with a lot of will, it's too much, and I end up doing way more than 3 things. It's like I have extremely high inertia: either nothing is moved, or I move until I collapse, which contributes to difficulty of getting going again.
I'll try this, just three, thanks.
Cleaning: sticky label glues are usually oil soluble. Remove sticker best you can (optional). Make a baking soda + cooking oil paste, leave paste on for 20ish minutes, gently use the paste to scrub stickiness off. Can also use this strategy to de-grease sticky cookware or kitchen appliances.
You can use the Fibonacci sequence to approximate miles to kilometers conversion. It goes 1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144...
It works because "there are 1.609 kilometers in a mile, which is within 0.5% of the Golden ratio." Any non Fibonacci number can be estimated as a sum of Fibonacci's, convert, then added. Going from km to miles, you look for preceding Fibonacci's. Eg 400km to miles:
(Tip inspired by @jzimbel sharing a good hack)
Alternatively, you can use some of that new age math. Given that 1 mile = 1.609 km, you get a fairly good estimate by calculating
So, for example, 13 miles = 13 km + 6.5 km + 1.3 km = 20.8 km (real value is 20.917 km).
Similarly, 1 km = 0.6214 miles, so the following is a pretty good estimate (but not quite as good as converting the other way)
New math gets a bad rep, but I honestly wish I had been taught like that from the beginning. The Fibonacci is great for when I can't remember that the golden ratio is 1.6, and only have enough brain cells to remember 1+1=2. I love the way you broke this down, though, it's similar to how I mentally do 15% tip.