Life Hack: Tips for Unusual and Useful Ways to Utilize Stationery

When my company just started around the New Year holidays and didn’t yet have any office supplies nor even a fur tree, together we decided to get creative. We looked around and collected a lot of green post-it notes; on the back of these notes we wrote our predictions for the coming year and attached the notes to the wall in the form of a tree.  After that we organized a mystique session, as we were tearing the sheets off and reading out the forecasts on the other side.

So once you engage a little bit of your imagination, you can utilize stationery in all sorts of extraordinary ways – and not just in the office.  For instance, you can use standard paper clips for hanging up your curtains, fixing a bra strap or replacing a broken zipper pull. Lacking a fork? Not a problem! You can unfold several paper clips, attach them to a pencil – your fork is ready.

Double-sided tape and a stapler could hold together a torn lining of a skirt or a turn-up on pants. Ordinary sellotape serves well for removing bubbles from woolen clothes.

If you have a piece of a heated plasticine, you can use this to collect tiny fragments, for example, shards of glass, not visible to the eye.

Tipex can be used to paint over scratches and damages on white enamel.

If you don’t have a glue brush, you can make one by splitting the plastic part of a ballpoint pen.

If you feel like making a nice stand for a smartphone, just make use of several wooden pencils and rubber bands for banknotes.

Pencils can make a great lubricant for a tight zipper, squeaking hinges and even for trolley wheels. Also curtains hooks slide along the rail much more easily, if you draw over both the hook and the curtain rail with a pencil.

You can use a mechanical pencil to light a gas oven (first make sure that the pencil body is metal rather than plastic), replace the graphite part with a match and set it alight!

Old useless floppy disks can gain a new life, if you fasten several of them together.  This way you create a perfect stand for your writing instruments or a box for your odds and ends.

It seems that bulldog clips are most popular in this extraordinary use of stationery: people can use them to make a stand for a phone, a photo holder, as a clip for packs with spices or for a tube of toothpaste. You can also bind computer and TV cords with paper clips.  Another way to make use of bulldog clips would be as a separator in the fridge, which would create a section for bottles, so that they do not fall and roll on the entire fridge shelf.

By arranging a group of bulldog clips you can also create an art installation for either a wall or a table.

But the most important piece of advice is if you would like to get creative with stationery at home, don’t steal it from the office; since there it can be used for its intended purpose.

Photo: Shutterstock

Support us!

All your donations will be used to pay the magazine’s journalists and to support the ongoing costs of maintaining the site.