Quick Skills: Shoelaces
What’s this? Quick skills are small challenges that are rewarding and once mastered you’ll have forever. You can add them to your arsenal of awesome in as little as five minutes.
Skill Shoelaces.
Time to Learn 15 minutes.
Equipment A shoe. With laces.
Why waste time tying your shoes? No good reason, that’s why. If you tie your shoes the same way you were taught when you were a kid, you’re doing it wrong. It’s slow, inefficient and imbalanced. There’s a more optimal method, but it’s a little tricky to explain in text, so I’m going to delegate to Ian over at Ian’s Shoelace Site who lays it out with a true multimedia approach: text, pictures and animation. Go check it out, we’ll wait.
How to tie your shoelaces the awesome way, by Ian.
That should keep your hands tied for a while, but the stressful demands of modern life require more from a knot. You can’t take the risk of those ropes coming undone. The traditional double knot is one solution, but is a significant handicap to getting your shoes off. An alternative is to tuck the loops of the single knot under your lacing.
You get the same level of protection, and our testing here in the TwoShay lab (with real science!) showed it takes 10-20% longer to tie, but yields a massive 75% reduction in the time taken to untie the knot. Over the course of a year (assuming you put your shoes on at least once a day) this will save you at least 42 minutes, which is an extra viewing of “The Empire Strikes Back” every 3 years!
Protips
- Keep the single knot tight by making the loops around your fingers small and close together.
- Use your little fingers to pull your initial cross tight to elimate double handling of the laces.
Who’s better?
Click here if you do not see an embedded video
Xavier is the old hand at this, but didn’t bring his A-game and crumbled under pressure on the starting line. Jared’s rigourous training routine (learning the night before) allowed him to capitalize with an easy victory.
Winner: Jared.
Discussion
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