I’m a sucker for “life hacks” in magazines and on the Internet. If there’s an easier way to get dinner on the table, I’ll follow you on Twitter. If there’s a video on 50 ways to use WD-40, I’m all over that.

All that glitters isn’t gold, though. It’s not until you’ve been burned by some seemingly brilliant idea that one starts to question whether or not the idea was really that good.

One article that looked appealing was keeping pot lids in order. Mine are thrown in the middle of the cabinet, so I was eager for a better way.

The site said to take plastic coat hooks, measure the width of the lid and then stick the hooks to the back of the cabinet door.  

I had one of those plastic coat hooks a few years ago. It stuck to the door and then the hook snapped off.

If I followed this hack, I’d have broken coat hooks permanently glued to the back of our kitchen cabinet door and the pot lids would still be all over the place.

Keeping shoes in order is a tough one for me. Most of my shoes are either stacked on a shelf in my closet or shoved underneath the couch. So I looked with skepticism at the picture of a cubby holder with a hole for each shoe.

Most women I know kick their shoes off in the car or at the back door. If I had time to put each shoe in its own holder, I’d have time to grow my own crops and churn my own butter.

One hack looked pretty nifty – use muffin tins for all kinds of chores, including holding stuffed bell peppers in place for baking and as a portable ketchup, mustard and pickle holder at a barbecue.

After 25 years of use, our muffin tins have so many layers of baked on-grease that they’re brown instead of silver. There’s no way I’d put that gunked-up muffin tin out as a serving dish.

This one made me laugh out loud – clean out a plastic ketchup bottle and fill it with pancake batter for an easy and no-mess way to create round pancakes each and every time.

First of all, these people have obviously never tried to get anything back inside the narrow hole in the top of the ketchup bottle. It’s about as easy as scraping off the glue strip from one of those plastic coat hangers after it breaks off on the back of your closet door.

Worse, by the time you washed out the ketchup bottle, found a funnel and waited for the batter to slowly drip from the funnel into the bottle and then onto the griddle, you could’ve already had a 12-inch stack of flapjacks on the table.

Another hack advised breaking the ends off of store coat hangers and using the clips for potato chip bags. I tried that and all I got for my effort was a broken pair of scissors and two broken fingernails.

Another tip called for using a hanging shoe rack to store cleaning supplies. I don’t know what kind of dirt requires 20 different kinds of cleaners, but a bottle of Windex, a can of Comet Cleanser and a squeeze bottle of Ty-D-Bol are all I need.

And, last but not least, there’s a new attachment for your cell phone. You clip a tennis ball to it so you can take the perfect selfie with your dog. Like your dog would ever sit still when there’s a tennis ball in sight.

I guess the people who’d buy that attachment are the same people who have individual cubby holes for all their shoes, make pancakes with a used ketchup bottle and have a dozen bags of chips in the pantry sealed up nice and tidy.

I could save these folks a lot of time and energy – throw the shoes by the back door, use a soup ladle for the flap jacks and eat all the chips in one sitting.

That’s life hack advice I can use.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.