Packing quickly and efficiently for travels is not an easy task for most. You don’t have room, but you do have stuff — a lot of stuff — so you are forced to roll up your sleeves and pack your suitcase with organized direction instead of haphazard action. When faced with this unfortunate situation, here are a few tips to ease the situation.

Place items efficiently

When packing a suitcase, it’s important to keep in mind that you aren’t packing a two-dimensional object.

You can assume that if that suitcase is going anywhere then it will be rotated at least twice, and probably more. That means putting things at the bottom of a suitcase that might respond poorly to a lot of pressure (such as some toiletries) is a bad idea.

It might not seem like too much pressure when you’re packing, but once that suitcase is righted and rolling, the stuff at the bottom might be under more pressure than you expected.

Think about space

Dealing with space means realizing which things take up the most space and then taking the worst offenders someplace else. The point isn’t to conserve space since the space will end up being used by the end of the packing process. The point of packing is to make the most of the space you have, which means deciding what is worth having there.

When packing a suitcase, this probably means reassessing what you really need to take with you because space is the limiting factor. It becomes especially important to prioritize what you really need to take with you when you have an accurate idea of how much space you have to work with.

Learn some new tricks

Folding clothes can go a long way toward lowering the space they take up and the wrinkles they accumulate. A tip for folding clothes is to arrange them in such a way that you take them out of the drawer or suitcase where they’re folded over, or else they might unfold while you’re taking them out.

If the clothes are folded similarly enough, they can stack up very consistently. This is a good opportunity to snugly fit in other things between the piles. Cushioning more fragile items with stacks of folded clothing is a good way to save space while ensuring your novelty teacup set remains whole.

Yoav is a junior in LAS.

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