We get it: you’re bored. What’s an engineer to do without projects? And how can we get stuff done without materials when all of the materials are “non-essential purchases”? There are still plenty of relevant projects that can be done that do not involve full household organization or repainting. Here are fourteen ideas for things to do that will bring sanity to your quarantined life that do not require a trip to the home improvement store.
- Purge all of your old electronics and peripherals. Face it, are you really going to use that old external 5.25″ drive that’s taking up space in your closet? Or the 9 pin to 16 pin adapters? Time to let it go. Streamline down to what you actually use. Box up everything for electronics recycling. (https://www.consumerreports.org/recycling/how-to-recycle-electronics/)
- Clear off your USB drives. You know you’ve got two or three in your work bag with random files on them. Time to clean them up and save your files somewhere more permanent.
- Backup your computer(s). Photos, music, files – put it all on an external hard drive, and/or cloud drive for redundancy. Bonus points for organizing it all.
- Organize apps. How many screens are you up to on your phone? Four? Six? More? Take 30 minutes and organize all of your apps into menus.
- Fix your broken crap. Do you put away things that are broken saying, “I’ll fix it later, when I have superglue”? It’s later. Add a tube of superglue to the instacart and get cracking.
- Purge publications and magazines. Unless you’re collecting a specific periodical, if it’s more than three months old, time to recycle it. Tear out the articles and pictures you want to keep and get rid of the bulk.
- Go paperless. Scan your bills, receipts, and keeper papers, then shred the hard copies. No scanner? Use a PDF generating phone/tablet app and save it all to a cloud drive.
- Untangle necklaces. We all have a few that relegated to the back of the jewelry box, in knots. You’ve got time now to carefully undo the tangles and return your baubles to circulation.
- Purge your makeup bag (or vanity). You know you should be doing this every three to six months, but of course none of us do. If you can’t remember when you bought it, it’s time for it to go. (https://www.health.com/beauty/when-to-throw-away-makeup) Pitch all of the blender sponges for good measure. Don’t forget to wash your brushes.
- Mend your clothes. We all have shirts missing buttons or pants with loose hems. Gather them up and repair them.
- Update your address book/contact list. Now’s a good time to catch everyone to get current addresses and phone numbers. Get a jump on the holiday season!
- Unsubscribe from junk email. Take the time to clear out the junk permanently by unsubscribing from every mailing list. It’s tedious but worth it.
- Clear out the junk drawer(s). We all have them, they’re all overflowing, let’s clear them out. If your dollar store is open, score some cheap little organizer bins and bring order to the chaos.
- Catch up scrapbooks / albums. Maybe this is just me, but I have years of photos and memories to organize and scrap, with three or four blank scrapbooks hanging around. Now’s a perfect time to stroll down memory lane and work on archiving all of it for posterity.
