Packing Your Stuff.

On travel: I have learnt that you need four times as much water, twice as much money and half as many clothes as you think you need at the outset.

Gavin Esler

A woman packing her luggage.

A young boy was once shown a large empty glass jar with a screw top lid. He was handed a box of tennis balls and asked to fill the jar. He poured in some tennis balls and then moved them around a bit to try to squeeze in another tennis ball before screwing down the lid. ‘Is the jar full?’ he was asked. ‘Yes, it’s full,’ he replied. But then he was given a box of marbles and asked to see if he could fit any more in the jar. He opened the lid and found that he could fit quite a few marbles in between the tennis balls. Giving the jar a shake now and then allowed the marbles to settle into the spaces. Eventually, he couldn’t fit in another marble and announced that the jar was now full. His mentor then produced a bag of sand and asked the boy to fill the jar. Again, he unscrewed the lid and poured the sand into the top of the jar. This time he didn’t need to fiddle around very much at all, just give the jar a careful shake now and again to make sure that the sand was pouring into all the empty nooks and crannies between the tennis balls and the marbles. Finally, he couldn’t fit any more sand in the jar and screwed the lid back down again.

The jar really was full! There are some lessons to be learned from this story. If the boy had been given the sand first and asked to fill up the jar, then there would not have been any room to fit in any marbles or tennis balls afterwards. You need to start with the biggest things if there is to be any room for them at all. The same applies to more familiar packing problems. If you need to move lots of packages into a van then you might want to know how you should set about loading them in order to have the best chance of getting them all in. Our little story shows why you should start with the largest objects and then pack the next largest and so on, leaving the smallest until last. The shapes of the things you are trying to pack clearly matter. Often, they are all the same size. If you are a manufacturer of sweets or other small food items, you might want to know what shape they should be in order to fit as many as possible into a jar or some other large storage container.

Move goods from one place to another.

For a long time, it was thought that the answer was to make them all little spheres, like gobstoppers. Lots of little spheres seemed to give the smallest amount of empty space in between the closely packed balls. Interestingly, it turned out that this wasn’t the best shape to use. If sweets are made in the shape of little ellipsoids, rather like mini-rugby balls or almonds, then more of the space can be filled by them. So Smarties and M&Ms fill a volume more efficiently than any collection of identical spheres. If the ellipsoids have their short to long axes in the ratio of 1 to 2, then they leave just 32% of the space empty, compared with 36% if they were made into spheres. This seemingly trivial fact has many important consequences for business efficiency and industrial manufacture, reducing wastage, shipping costs and the avoidance of unnecessary packaging.

Also Read:- The Global Village.

--------------*-*-*----------------------*-*-*-----------------*-*-*----------------

Image Credit :- Pixabay

"Keyword"

"how to pack for a move checklist"

"moving packing tips and tricks"

"packing to move where to start"

"how to pack to move in a hurry"

"packing paper"

"how to pack clothes for a move"

"what to pack first when moving"

"how to pack household items for moving"