Everyone likes it when their life is easy. The rise of internet shopping, grocery deliveries and explosion of chain restaurants that bring food right to your door prove that, in the modern era, convenience is king. No one likes unnecessary hassles, and they tend to bother people more than ever when people are surrounded by constant convenience. As such, people today often get very frustrated over the smallest of things. It may seem odd that people complain about such little things when everything else is so simple, but it actually makes sense. When everything else is working perfectly, the things that do not work properly stand out even more. This can lead to people appearing to overreact to the most minor of issues. 

Some hassles will never go away. There will always be things that break or are inconvenient. That said, there are many minor problems that can easily be corrected. Correcting those issues, in turn, makes life much easier and less stressful. Everyone has enough stress in their lives today without worrying about the little things that drive them crazy. Here are 15 items guaranteed to make your life easier.

You have probably heard that packing a lunch to take with you to work is much better for both your wallet and your health than getting lunch out all the time. Home cooked meals are almost always better for you than take out, even when you are only making something as simple as a sandwich. Homemade food tends to include fewer preservatives, fatty sauces and use fresher ingredients than delis and restaurants. Taking your own lunch, however, can be a pain if you do not have dishes to eat off of or somewhere to store your food. A stackable lunch carrier can help on both those fronts. The various sections of the container stack neatly, so it does not take up much room. Those sections also double as plates or bowls for your lunch. Most such carriers are dishwasher safe as well, so there really is no excuse for not taking your lunch to work. 

Not everyone likes to eat their meals cold. Many people find that they feel more satisfied after eating a hot meal than one that is cold or room temperature. Hot food is also often more comforting than cold. As such, many people would prefer to eat a warm lunch if possible. Unfortunately, not everyone brings food that is easily microwaved. Besides, not every office even has a communal microwave. In those cases, some people pack food in aluminum foil or a thermos in order to try and keep the food hot for as long as possible. Those are not, however, always enough. 

 

If you are someone who really wants to keep their lunch warm, you need a heated lunch box. These handy devices are exactly what they sound like. They are lunchboxes that you can plug into the wall to keep your food warm or reheat food that has gone cold. Now that is a handy thing to keep at your desk! 

One of the hardest parts about losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight is avoiding overeating. Most people know that to lose weight or at least avoid gaining weight they need to pass on fatty foods such as pizza and cheeseburgers. The majority of people, however, find themselves struggling to know how much pasta they can eat without packing on the pounds or figuring out how many vegetables they should eat at dinner. There are not many people beyond professional chefs after all that think in grams when they are cooking. Most Americans think in terms of cups or tablespoons. As a result, advice such as “eat 20 grams of protein at each meal” is well meaning but unhelpful. Portion control containers, however, make it easy to figure out how much of each food group you should eat. Simply fill the container with the food group written on the side, and dig in. It is much easier than trying to count calories in your head.

The odds are that you have taken something to work to eat, only to get there and realize that you do not have any condiments to put on it. You brought a sandwich, but you forgot to pack mustard. You made yourself a healthy salad, but you do not have any salad dressing. If you keep finding yourself in such situations, you have a couple of options. You could buy a full sized bottle of whatever condiment you need the most, keep it in the office’s communal fridge and hope that no one uses it all up. You could simply deal with not having anything to put on your food. You could stuff an entire bottle of Italian salad dressing in your lunchbox every day. You could also save yourself a lot of trouble and buy a set of small condiment bottles. These bottles are meant to hold one or two servings of salad dressing, condiments or other sauces and fit neatly inside of a lunchbox of bag.

How can you tell when you have done a load of laundry that included a super soft sweater or a pair of fuzzy socks? Easy, you look to see if everything else in your load of laundry is covered in fuzzies that match the color of your sweater or socks. Your sweater or socks, of course, have not simply shed their fuzzies all over the rest of your clothes. Instead, the fuzzies have spread to the rest of the load of laundry while also managing to multiply on the original piece of clothing. It is enough to drive anyone crazy. What you need to do is get rid of the fuzzies in the first place. For that, you need a fabric defuzzer. This small tool will help remove pilling and fuzz from your clothing in order to keep your clothing looking nice and to avoid fuzzies multiplying like bunnies inside the washer. 

If you live at the top of a building with several levels but no elevator, carrying your groceries up to your floor is probably one of your least favorite tasks in existence. It is boring, repetitive and tiring to have to run up and down the stairs repeatedly simply because you could not manage to carry all of your purchases in one trip. If you have a loved one who is elderly and still shops for themselves, you might also be worried about them making repeated journeys up and down the stairs. In either case, a stair climbing cart might be your new best friend. This handy carrier is exactly what it sounds like, a grocery cart that has a system of three rear wheels on each side so that it can roll up and down the stairs. It also collapses so that you can tuck it away in a closet or under the bed until you need it again.

Cleaning the stove is a hateful chore. The heat from cooking bakes any stain or spill deep into the cooktop, and scrubbing it off takes forever. To make matters worse, the excessive amount of soap required to get the burned gunk off sticks to the cooktop. When you use the stove next, everything smells like burning soap. Baking soda can only go so far to help, too. Baking soda mixes do best when what you are cleaning can sit in the soda and soak. That is rather hard to do with a whole stovetop. Thankfully, there are cleaners made specifically for cleaning off stoves and other cooking surfaces. Cooktop cleaner kits are meant to enable you to remove burned on food from the stovetop without damaging the appliance, relying on harsh chemicals or spending all day scrubbing at the exact same spot. It makes getting up that baked on old curry much easier so you can go about your life without needing to decide whether you value a clean stove or your afternoon plans more.

Most people like having all the latest greatest electronics. They own a laptop, tablet, smartphone, iPod and all the gadgets to go with each of them. That does, however, mean that each person is keeping track of all the cords that go with each device. This can become maddening. The cords tangle and fray. They get wrapped around chair legs, headphones and anything else that they come in contact with even briefly. Since the chords are also often the same color, you have to keep track of which cord goes to which device. It is enough to drive anyone up the wall. As such, it is always handy when you can find a way to eliminate some of the chords from your daily life. That is why a wireless charger is such a handy device to own. You can charge your phone without having to worry about figuring out which cord belongs to the phone.

People rely on their phones for just about everything these days. Phones are not just for speaking to other people, they are also GPS systems for navigation, telephone directories, address finders, entertainment, education and even banking. As such, the last thing anyone wants to contemplate is being halfway through a road trip and having your phone run out of battery in an unfamiliar area. If you happen to be on a stretch of interstate with no exits for miles, you cannot even pull over and ask someone for directions. You are well and truly up a creek. That is why a vehicle charger is a useful tool to have in your car. If you ever run out of battery while on the move, you can simply plug the charger into your car and charge your phone while you drive. It is small, convenient and a good safety measure to keep in your glovebox so you are not stuck in an unfamiliar area without a way to contact help if something goes happens.

It is always nice to be able to do two things at once, especially when one of those things can be quite time consuming. When it comes to cooking, one of the steps that always takes the longest is cutting up the vegetables, fruits and meats that are going into the recipe. Professional chefs might be able to mince three onions in 15 seconds, but most people require noticeably longer than that to cut up a single vegetable. That is why chop containers come in so handy. You can simply place the fruit or vegetable on the blades, press down on the container lid and the vegetable is minced or chopped. The pieces are also automatically caught by the container, so storing your chopped veggies is easy as well. Chop containers come in a variety of sizes and can handle different foods. Some are meant purely for crisp vegetables, while others can deal with soft foods like hardboiled eggs and fruits as well. 

Embarrassing though it can be, sometimes the things that drive you the craziest are the ones that really are the most minor issues in existence. Case in point is probably the fact that bagels stay freshest when they are not precut, but trying to saw open your bagel in the morning when you are a caffeine deprived zombie is not a great way to start the day. Struggling with food is frustrating, and the odd shape of bagels means that it is easy for a bread knife to slip and potentially nick your fingers. As such, a bagel slicer is a good tool to have in your kitchen if you eat bagels often. They may not be complex pieces of equipment, but they sure come in handy on mornings when you are hungry and just want to eat your bagel while you wait for the coffee to brew.

Given trends towards minimalism and suggestions that everyone purge as many rarely used items from their life as possible, it should come as no surprise that the number of organization containers available to consumers has skyrocketed. There are containers in every possible size, shape and material. Given how prolific storage containers are, it can seem like too much hype over nothing. Food storage containers, however, are actually very useful things to have in your kitchen. Food storage containers do a better job than most simple packaging at keeping out air, water and, of course, bugs. Water and air will spoil your food faster, while the advantages of keeping bugs from getting interested in your leftovers is pretty self-explanatory. Food storage containers are also less likely to spill and tend to be easier to get out of the cabinets. Most of them also have flat tops, so you can stack them and save yourself some cabinet space.

Of all the kitchen appliances in the world, the humble rice cooker may be the one that is the most underestimated in the West. On one hand, this is not terribly surprising as rice is not the staple in Western homes that it is in Asia. That said, many Westerners enjoy rice. They cook it often and might cook it more often if they did not have to stand at the stove and babysit the pot to make sure the water did not boil over. Enter the rice cooker. It does exactly what the name implies. It cooks rice without you having to worry about water overflowing and covering the stove or the bottom layer of rice burning and sticking to the pan. Rice cookers come in a wide variety of sizes, ranging from single serving rice cookers to massive industrial sized vats, but most of them work the same way. Pour in the rice. Pour in the water. Push the button, and let the rice cook.

Under the bed storage containers are exactly what they sound like. They are storage containers that are usually long and shallow so that they slide easily under your bed. They come in a variety of materials including mesh, canvas and, of course, plastic. They are meant to seal tightly enough to keep out hair and dust so that whatever you store under the bed does not get dirty. Some such containers are made especially for specific items. Under the bed shoe storage containers, for example, are made to hold pairs of shoes. Others are made for clothing, jewelry or craft supplies. 

 

You may not think about putting things under your bed when you are organizing because you assume that anything that goes under the bed is going to be covered in dust bunnies when you finally retrieve it. An under the bed storage container, however, is specifically meant to keep the dust bunnies at bay and allow you to make use of all that empty space you are ignoring.

There is no reason to stress over things that can easily be corrected. Some people might scoff or roll their eyes at the idea of spending money to deal with what they see as such a minor problem, but it really is none of their concern. No matter how small the issue is, if it truly bothers you day in and day out, it is worth fixing. It is simply up to you how much you are willing to spend. After all, you are the only one who can decide what peace of mind and escape from that inconvenience is really worth to you.