Do you have the feeling that your refrigerator is always in a mess? There is hope. Do what the chefs in restaurant kitchens do.【小题1】It helps the cooks work faster and it reduces the amount of wasted food. Here is how you can keep your contents in the refrigerators in order.

Step one is to take everything out of your refrigerator. Everything. That includes the moldy meat sauce and jars with half-eaten contents.【小题2】

Now you are ready to refill the refrigerator. Do not treat it like a junk drawer for food.【小题3】Your fridge may come with some zones that are set aside, such as crisper drawers and cheese drawers. Restaurants keep smaller containers together on rimmed baking sheets. The sheets are easy to pull out and it is easy to look at their contents.

You should know about food safety. It can help you decide what should go where in your refrigerator. Refrigerators are coldest toward their back and bottom. They are warmer on the top shelf. They are warmest in the door. The door is great for condiments (酱料) with a long shelf life such as jam, mustard, and hot sauce.【小题4】Raw meat should always go at the bottom of the refrigerator.

【小题5】One rule is FIFO. It means “first in, first out”. New leftover food should always go to the back of the refrigerator, pushing older food to the front of the line. It means older food will get used up first.

Tips for Cooking on a Tight Schedule

From my experience, there are three main reasons why people don’t cook more often: ability, money and time.【小题1】 Money is a topic I’ll save for another day. So today I want to give you some wisdom about how to make the most of the time you spend in the kitchen. Here are three tips for great cooking on a tight schedule:

Think ahead. The moments when I think cooking is a pain are when I’m already hungry and there is nothing ready to eat. So think ahead of the coming week. When will you have time to cook? Do you have the right materials ready?【小题2】

Make your time worth it. When you do find time to cook a meal, make the most of it and save yourself time later on. Are you making one loaf of bread?【小题3】 It takes around the same amount of time to make more of something. So save yourself the effort for a future meal.

【小题4】 This may surprise you, but one of the best tools for making cooking worth your time is experimentation. It gives you the chance to hit upon new ideas and recipes (食谱) that can work well with your appetite and schedule. The more you learn and the more you try, the more ability you have to take control of your food and your schedule.

On an average day most of us check our smartphones 47 times, and this habit clouds our judgment on what information to select and store, which might explain why it’s time we should do things about the information we take in to form memories.

As simple as it sounds, the repetition of tasks-reading, or saying words over and over — continues to be the best method for transforming short-term memories into long-term ones. To do that, we have to retrain our minds to focus on one task at a time. Sadly, most turn a blind eye to this formula because we believe we’re productive. New connections are made in your brain when you learn, so to remember what you learn, do what you probably did in your youth: Repeat words, thoughts and ideas over and over until you get them right.

Also, spaced repetition might be the best way. Quickly pushing facts into our brains leads us to forget them in the long term. When you review knowledge and practice it often, it sticks, a research has shown. So if you can include what you’re trying to remember into daily life, ideally over time, your chances of keeping it significantly improve. But once you stop reviewing that knowledge, the retention (保留) drops greatly. To get past it, space out your repetition over a few days and test the effect yourself. But be careful: find a healthy interval that works. This is a good way to effectively start tackling a new language.

Sometimes, memory and focus usually go hand-in-hand. Dr. Cowan suggests rearranging our office setup as one way to improve focus. “The rebirth of the open workplace cannot be helping stay on task, ” Dr. Cowan said. Referring to work spaces without desks, physical barriers and privacy, but with a lot of playthings.

Multiple studies have found that procrastination (拖延) leads to stress and completely kills focus. Stop engaging in useless tasks like surfing the web and just handle whatever it is you need to work on. Then watch your focus increase quickly and your memory improve.

Memory is very cue (提示) dependent, “Mr. Schacter, a psychologist, said, referring to”. Something he calls absent-minded memory failure. “Most say it could never happen to me, but it’s a very long list of responsible people that it has happened to. When you don’t have that cue, you can forget almost everything.”

A simple way around that is to set reminders. Even better, combine a few of these techniques: Write your reminder on a post-it and put it on your desk so you’re forced to repeatedly look at it over a long period, including the practice of spaced repetition.