1. Use fresh milk for your second bowl of cereal

Flickr / Melissa Wiese

When I eat cereal for breakfast, after I’m done eating, I invariably wind up with almost half a bowl of leftover milk. The obvious solution is to pour in some more cereal, which always worked for me, seeing as how one bowl never really satisfies my morning hunger. But why is that second bowl never as good as the first?

It’s because that leftover milk has already been used. It’s not cold out of the fridge anymore. And if you’re eating a sugary cereal like Cap’n Crunch or Waffle Crisp, that first serving of milk is going to be overly sweetened. The result will be a second bowl that leaves you questioning why you chose cereal in the first place. Just add a little bit more cold milk to your second bowl, just enough to cut through the warm, overly-sweetened older milk.

2. Start paying your bills

I kept getting all of these collection notices and harassing phone calls. The envelopes always said “Past Due!” and the messages on my voicemail warned me about destroying my credit score. And it was all true, the bills just kept piling up, my credit score kept sinking.

And then one day I went online and paid some of my bills. I kept paying them and eventually they turned my cell phone back on. Now that I have service, the threatening phone calls are getting fewer and farther in between. So just pay your bills, and keep paying them.

3. Unroll your socks before you put them in the washing machine

For years I would scratch my head in confusion, wondering why my socks always came out of the washer and dryer still wet. Worse, by the time I got around to folding my laundry, the wet socks would have been sitting there sometimes for days, totally defeating the purpose of washing them in the first place. None of my other clothing seemed to suffer from this dampening. It was just the socks.

And then one day I made the connection: when I take my socks off at the end of the day, they always wound up rolled into a ball. Maybe it’s the elastic in the socks, or perhaps it’s the way in which I scrunch them up and throw them into my laundry hamper. I don’t understand the specifics. But what I do know is, if I can take the time to unroll my socks before I run them through my machines, they’ll come out nice and dry.

4. Brush your teeth

I used to think that people who spent money on toothbrushes and toothpaste were the dumbest of the dumb. Come on, those fossilized Neanderthal skeletons always have teeth, and they probably didn’t have toothbrushes and toothpaste. But everyone kept complaining about my bad breath and lack or oral hygiene.

Finally one day I went to the dentist because of a toothache. He told me, “Rob, you really need to start brushing your teeth.” He even gave me a free toothbrush. I thought, OK, I’ll give it a shot. And you know what? It worked. My teeth actually feel pretty great now.

Read the rest at Thought Catalog.