Let's face it: We are tragically ineffective people. Don't try to deny it. You're reading Cracked right now instead of doing literally anything else; that's proof enough right there. Luckily the internet, the primary cause of our efficiency deficiency, might also be the cure: I've found as many quick, easy methods to streamline your life as I could
Let's face it: We are tragically ineffective people. Don't try to deny it. You're reading Cracked right now instead of doing literally anything else; that's proof enough right there. Luckily the Internet, the primary cause of our efficiency deficiency, might also be the cure: I've found as many quick, easy methods to streamline your life as I could threaten Google into giving me. And so you're sure there's actual merit to all of these practices, I'll also be testing them out first. Hopefully nothing goes horribly awry here, though even money says I somehow end up in prison again.
Day 1:
Most Efficient Way to Sleep
Let's start with the biggest time-waster of all: sleep. Every night, you have to bend to Big Slumber's twisted whims, sacrificing perfectly good video game and pornography time just to lay completely motionless in week-old laundry for eight hours. We need to gut sleep like the little bitch it is, and for that, we turn to something called polyphasic sleeping
. The basic idea is that there are five stages to normal sleep, but only one of those is actually important: the REM phase, where dreaming happens. By cutting out the chaff, you can shake down your brain until it gives up and learns to slip directly into REM sleep the second you close your eyes, thus streamlining the process. It's basically mugging the shit out of your own mind, and then pilfering the sweet dream-meats within while it lies beaten and bloody on the floor. There are several types of polyphasic schedules, but for the purposes of this test, I will be using the Uberman system, which consists of sleeping only 20 minutes per session, once every four hours.
Uberman: Terrorize your brain.
Ideally, once you've grown accustomed to that schedule, you'll only need a total of two hours of sleep for every 24-hour period. I started this last night, and it's working pretty OK so far. I'm a bit tired now, but I find that the naps refresh me just enough to keep going. However, it is supposed to take roughly a week to retrain your brain for optimal sleeping habits, so this is more of a passive test for now. We'll see how it progresses as time passes.
Day 2:
Most Efficient Way to Stir LiquidsAccording to the Japanese, everything you've done today, you've done completely wrong. Those people are to efficiency what Wade Boggs is to whatever it is Wade Boggs does -- some kind of marsh monster, I'm assuming? Like the secret identity of Swamp Thing? Shit, I don't know: Sleep deprivation is making it kind of hard to focus. Anyway, this Japanese method
is about to call into question everything you know about stirring powder into liquids. It's going to turn the powder-dissolution world on its fucking ear! Are you sitting down? Are you ready for this? The best way to stir a powder into a liquid is actually by using lateral, straight motions, and not
the conventional circular pattern we all know and love.
Eat shit and die, conventional stirring.
For those of us who frequently stir powders into our drinks and the drinks of others, this method could save literally dozens of seconds every month! Hey, speaking of stirring powder into things ...Most Efficient Way to Take Adderall
This sleep schedule is killing me. I just put the milk outside and tried to drink out of the dog. Something must be done. Luckily, the drugs forum -- the single most reputable forum in existence -- has a more efficient way to ingest our recommended daily intake of vitamin Adderall: Just take a teaspoon or two of baking soda an hour beforehand
. See, the effectiveness of amphetamines depends largely on the pH of the stomach, and alkaline agents like baking soda help speed the initial absorption, as well as decrease the efficiency of the elimination process.
Which, when coupled with a drastic increase in introduction rates, leads to something I call "the efficiency seizures."
In short: takes effect sooner, lasts longer. Technically, this works on all amphetamines, but of course a quick Google search tells me Adderall is the most widely available legal one, so let's all just assume that's the thing I'm stirring into my Grape Kool-Aid every other hour.Most Efficient Shoe Lace Knot
Thaaaaaaat's beeeeeetter! I don't know if it's the polyphasic sleep finally kicking in, or just the Ol' Nippon Swish kick-starting my amphetamine intake, but I really feel like I could (and should) fight some kind of snake right now. The closest thing I have to that on my agenda, however, is tying my shoes. Let's do the SHIT OUT OF THAT
!
This is the Ian-knot, so named for the intertwined duality inherent in the many roles of Sir Ian McKellan and holy shit I can type so fast look at this! You can just tell that sentence was fast, right? By reading the words? They read fast as shit, right!? Hey, OK, task at hand: Begin with a normal starting knot, cross the two laces and tuck one under and through. Then you do th...
... w-what is this, witchcraft? I don't- Listen, I don't have time for this. The website says you do this shit:"The right (blue) lace is held
between the right thumb and forefinger whilst the left (yellow) lace is held around the left thumb and forefinger, using the other fingers of the left hand to hold the lace taut. This move creates two loops, one with the loose end behind, the other with the loose end in front. Use the middle finger of the right hand to push the loose end of the right lace behind, whilst the left hand simply rotates forwards to swing its loop across to the right. This next move crosses the two loops over each other. Use the left thumb to push its loose end over to the right, whilst the right middle finger continues to push its loose end all the way between the left thumb and forefinger to end up inside the left loop. This tricky move requires each hand to use the two fingers inside its own loop to grab the loose end of the
other hand's loop. Use the left thumb and forefinger to grab the loose right end, then the right thumb and middle finger can grab the loose left end. This final step simply completes the knot by pulling the loops tight."See, efficiency is already paying off! Copy/pasting those directions was way faster than explaining them. Found the process a little incomprehensible? So what!? You don't need to understand shit, buddy; you've got fucking witch shoes now. Oh, and as a bonus, not only is this the fastest common knot, but it will almost never come undone -- even while kicking dozens of furious snakes!Get off my feet!GET OFF MY FEET, SNAKES
.
Day 3:
The Most Efficient Way to Drink
Alone.
I have found the Uberman schedule to be astoundingly effective, and if a few of the neighborhood cats want to give me disturbing orders as a side effect, so be it! However, I find myself, if anything, a bit too
awake right now. I can actually see through people's intentions, and I am in no way ready for that kind of responsibility. Maybe it's just an adjustment period in the sleep schedule, or maybe I wasn't supposed to factor this Japanese meth-cocoa into my hourly routine, but regardless, I now find I need to tone things down a bit. So this is as good a time as any to explore the most efficient way to have a nice relaxing drink or 12 (and without consequences!). In 2004, a double-blind, placebo controlled crossover trial found that prickly pear extract inhibits the production of inflammatory mediators associated with the symptoms of hangovers, if consumed approximately five hours before drinking alcohol. Further, most negative effects of alcohol are only caused in the first place by toxins called congeners, which mostly show up in dark liquors like red wine, bourbon, whiskey and tequila. Clear liquors have significantly fewer toxins. So if pear extract counteracts the effects of congeners, and clear liquors have the least to start with, then does pear vodka theoretically cancel itself out? I'm going to assume yes. I'm going to assume yes forever! Most Efficient Way to Peel a Potato
For maximum efficiency, I have started Nippon Swishing whatever legal kind of amphetamine I said I was taking earlier right into the pear vodka. Now I want -- nay, need -- a potato, for reasons that are unclear to me at this time.As with all things, we must do this as efficiently as possible.
Step 1: Cut a thin slit around the circumference of the potato.Step 2: Boil until soft.Step 3: Plunge into a bowl of ice water for 10 seconds.Step 4: Grasp skin by each end, and pull off.Step 5: Become the thing you fear.
Day 4:
Most Efficient Way to MoveWalking is proving impossible, and I assume that's because I've become too efficient to do things any way less than optimally. I have sown the Google, and reaped this: The most efficient way to run is heel-striking.
The key is simply to contact the ground with your heel first. At first this was a little awkward, walking on just my heels, and I ended up kind of stilting around like Jack Skellington.
But eventually I nailed it. (PROPTIP: Think of it less like "walking," and more like "repeatedly stabbing the Earth with your feet.") The most efficient way to move in general is called slipstreaming, and the beauty of it is that it's beneficial to all parties. When an object travels in the slipstream -- a kind of air wake left behind by another object -- the rear object requires less power to maintain its speed, while the leading object actually moves faster, because the rear object reduces the low pressure region behind it. Of course, the two objects have to be moving at a pretty fair clip and nearly touching to achieve this effect, but I've found the astounding results well outweigh the risk: Every single time I disjointedly doll-walk/heel-stab right up behind somebody, they take off like a fucking shot.
Day 5:
Most Efficient Way to Boil WaterDid you know that a drip brew coffee maker is seven percent more efficient than even a high end electric kettle and I really wanted to put a question mark back there but it's like I can't actually catch up to my fingers so I'm trying to trick them into stopping with an exclamation point!Most Efficient Way to PackRoll everything.ROLL.EVERYTHING.Most Efficient Way to Fold a T-shirt
Hi Japan! I love you so much, you crazy archipelago! Actually I love everything because everything is fantastic and I am riding on a boat of euphoria cresting a wave of endorphins that's about to crash down and utterly obliterate a coastline of contentment. Hey, what's this shit about, T-shirts? Fuck yes, let's do whatever this is as hard as possible!
So I set the shirt down flat, front side up. Then I grab this side just off center, pinch the top edge right above that, then I ... fold it ...
... inside of ... itself? No. No, that's not right. It's wrong. All wrong. Everything is wrong. Something has turned. Japan just violated the universe and nothing is going to be OK. Nothing is ever going to be OK again.
Day 6:
Most Efficient Way to ThinkThinking is a boulder I can no longer push up this hill. I type now only because somebody (a mad man, perhaps?) told these fingers to start, and now they won't stop. I pray for the brief moments of respite that periods grant me. They are an oasis of relief in a desert of empty, worthless words. I need some help figuring a way out of this mess, and so I turn to mind-maps: Allegedly, a more efficient way to think.
Mind-maps are diagrams representing words, ideas and the various ways the DMV is trying to track your emotions. The key to mind-mapping is to intuitively align whatever concepts are in your mind along a series of branching paths, each ending in madness and death (except one that ends in candy, seen here).
And I've got to say, this practice really has helped. Before, I was plunging headlong through a thick, miasmic fog full of clowns and bastards, each wanting to simultaneously entertain and fuck me. But now I have reached out and grasped the universe just off center, and at the top edge, I pull. I am folding the universe into itself into itself into itself. The center cannot hold, because the center is a mobile concept. We will not yield -- not to bastards, not to clowns -- because now that we have a mind-map, we need only follow it to its inevitable, and in retrospect, obvious conclusion. Most Efficient Way to Kill a Man
The number 9 is the most sinister number. It wants you to think it's a six, but it can't quite pull it off; even if you flip it upside down there's something just slightly, subtly wrong about its presentation -- like the flat deadness you see behind the eyes of every single stewardess. Just look at its GIS results! Clearly, if any number knows how to kill a man, it's 9. Here is a brief list of efficient murder: Mostly temple-blows and neck-smashing. But wait, what's that down there -- the 9th most efficient way to kill a man? "The Coccyx: A powerful blow to the tail bone. Fatal.
"Yes. I say again: Yes.
In Conclusion:
What? Dude, I don't know. I've just slept for 65 hours, and I do not know where I am. I suspect it is a Denny's, by the sheer volume of palpable sadness and pancakes. I have no idea what all of this was for; I just wanted to tie my shoes faster. That's all. Just shave a minute or so from my footwear routine. Now I'm looking at like ... like some kind of Bizarro map to Candyland tattooed on my chest? I don't want to make too many assumptions here. The last ... however many days have passed (I think I burnt the part of my brain responsible for comprehending time) is naught but a series of rapid, disturbing still images, devoid of context or morality -- like attending a slideshow where your parents have accidentally mixed up their amateur porn with the vacation photos. But it's this section here in the upper left that's really troubling me.
Listen, don't say anything out loud -- the place may be bugged -- but if, at some point during my disappearance, the actor Judge Reinhold has suddenly died from mysterious ass-related injuries, blink twice.Wait, no, blink once; more efficient.
