I Made My Own Life Hack!

I’m switching up the formula for today’s blog entry. For the first time ever, I present to you a Life Hack that I discovered all on my own. That’s right, I didn’t find this hack online. I invented it.

The More Eraser Hack:

I’m going to tell you the story of how I discovered this hack. Believe it or not this hack took me, basically, my entire life to come up with. When I was little I always used to get annoyed when the erasers on the ends of my pencils would wear out.

I could always see that there was more eraser left inside the metal part of the pencil but as a child I just had no way of getting to it.

Fast-forward to middle school where I had the idea to peel off half of the metal by the eraser to get to that extra eraser. Doing this makes the eraser on your pencil take twice as long to fade away. I kept doing this for years.

Whenever I would run out of eraser on a pencil I would peel off some of the metal to get to more of the eraser.

Then, in high school I got a job as a tutor at Kumon Math and Reading Center. I still work there today actually. My first few years there I started noticing that the students would just stop using the pencils when the erasers wore out.

So, I would sometimes peel the metal parts of some of the pencils off during down-time so the students could use the pencils longer. Unfortunately, this just wasn’t very effective. Peeling off the metal with my bare fingers took a while and after the first few my fingers would start to hurt like crazy.

About a year ago I had, what I consider to this day to be, my greatest discovery ever! Sad, right? At Kumon, I have this little portable pencil sharpener that looks like this.

There is a hole for a normal number-two-sized pencil and a hole for a slightly bigger pencil. One day, about a year ago, I had the bright idea to take a pencil with a worn-down eraser, stick it backside into the big hole of the sharpener and sharpen it. Just like that, I had created my very own life hack.

It works beautifully. You can cut the metal off the extra bit of eraser that is inside the pencil very easily with a pencil sharpener.

This will work with pretty much any handheld non-battery-powered pencil sharpener. It is easier to use the standard slightly larger pencil hole found on many common pencil sharpeners but it also works on number-two-sized holes.

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Did he just write a five-hundred-word blog about one quick five-second life hack. Yes. Yes, I did.

Honestly, I was just so proud that I invented my own life hack that I had to share the story of how I figured it out. I’ve checked online and its seems like a very small percentage of people have also figured this hack out.

What did you think of my life hack this week? Do you know of any other eraser-related life hacks? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear about some. As always, see you next week on Life Hack Lab!