Last year, I made a shopping list of everything that made me happy in 2020. This year I have been trying to be less of a consumer, so I only have three things that I would recommend as gifts for the holidays. Each one helps to cultivate purpose and gratitude in my life, and they are all priced under $20. The three things are Moon List Workbooks, Blessing Cards and Wall Calendars, like this one. For the full list, visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/2021-holiday-gift-guide-claudias-picks — CD

Ask Metafilter asked its users: “What tiny purchases changed your life drastically?” The dozens of answers provide a wealth of useful tools and gear recommended by users. Example: “A cheap low-feature MP3 player, like they sell for $30 for exercising with. They have way longer battery life than a phone, so when you’re traveling you can have music the whole time without risking draining your phone and getting yourself stranded somewhere.” After reading this, I bought this tiny SanDisk 8GB Clip Jam MP3/FM Radio Player. — MF

Piggy-backing on an old recomendo tip for budgeting, my wishlists have morphed into a “Do not buy” list I keep on my phone. At the end of 2020, I went through all the product links I saved that I didn’t buy and asked myself if I still wanted them. Most of them were a resounding “No” and then deleted. Only a few were redirected to my husband for Christmas. The list continues to grow and money continues to be saved. — CD

Amazon has an insanely good return system. You can return most items (under 50 pounds) you bought on Amazon by simply bringing the item alone — without a box, without a label, without a print out — to a local UPS pickup counter, and they handle the rest. All you need is an Amazon supplied QR code on your phone. To get the code, look up the item on your orders page and when you ask for a return; returning it “naked” should be an option. — KK

If you’re looking for gift ideas, check out our Recomendo storefront. Here you’ll find the books, tools or products that we’ve recommended in our newsletter (if they are available on Amazon). Other Cool Tools Lab storefronts that you can check out are the items shared in the weekly What’s in My Bag? newsletter or the four favorite tools shared by guests on the Cool Tools Show podcast. — CD

Lately I’ve been posting photos of my sketchbook drawings of monsters, robots, space creatures, and contraptions on my Instagram feed, and people have asked if I could put them on various products. So I started a store on Society6, which has clocks, water bottles, bath mats, tables, notepads, stickers, and so on. Check it out here. — MF

I shop online for 99% of the stuff I need. It’s magic when it works. On the very rare occasions when it doesn’t work, I want to talk to a human, preferably by voice. Since a live human is expensive, access to them is often hard to find. To get a working number to a live human for a retailer or manufacturer I go to GetHuman. It’s a free clearinghouse website. They have the best number, what prompts to hit, how long to wait, and they will facilitate callbacks if you want. — KK

Here are 29 Psychological Tricks and Tactics Used to Make People Buy More found on Reddit. A little embarrassing how many of these “buy more/buy now” tricks I’ve fallen for. To combat this, I have a “buy it later” list that I add links to and thankfully forget about, and I recently made a rule to no longer shop from my phone. — CD

College students can get Amazon Prime (free shipping, streaming, cheap music) for free their first 6 months of being a student and 50% off thereafter. Check out Prime Student. — KK

Honey is an online coupon service much like the website Retailmenot. But instead of going to Retailmenot to get a discount code for an online shop (which works very well), Honey lives as an extension in your web browser and automatically pops up on the page when you go to a shopping site. It can also track prices. In my experience about 1 in 10 times Honey has a code I can actually use, but since it costs no money and zero effort to use, it is very much worth it. — KK

If you’re a member of Amazon Prime, you get guaranteed delivery dates for your Prime purchases. I recently learned you can get a $5 credit if a delivery is late. Just go to Amazon’s Live Chat and tell the representative that you have a late delivery and want a credit. It’s worked for me all four times I’ve tried it. — MF

Takecare.io is a curated list of sustainable alternatives for consumer goods and other innovative companies. It’s a crowdsourced list, so it’s growing all the time. Scroll through and check it out. — CD

This year for my Cool Tools Gift Guide, I picked past Recomendo favorites that I think would make great gifts like the the Sanuk Yoga Slings or the Philips Wake-up Light Alarm Clock. Although my absolute favorite gift (under $20), which I think every friend should have, is the Sweese Butter Keeper Crock. You can see the rest here. — CD

I went through all this past year’s recommendations from Recomendo and picked out a dozen items I think would make good inexpensive gifts. I posted my holiday gift list on our Cool Tools site, so many of my gift suggestions are somewhat toolish. — KK

Every year the editors of Cool Tools curate a number of gift suggestions selected from our website, newsletters, videos, and podcasts. This year, I’m recommending the Bug-a-salt fly shooter, a chimney charcoal starter, Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 synthesizer, and several other things that would make good gifts. Check out all my picks here. — MF

We live in an area where you must bring your own bag to the store. That usually meant recycled paper bags, or floppy cloth bags. At the suggestion of a guest on our Cool Tools podcast, we started using these fantastic Planet E collapsible “bags” that unfold into a rigid cloth box. They are roomier, much easier to pack and unpack, and can carry a lot of weight without distorting their shape. They are lower and wider, more stable so they won’t fall over, easier to move into the car. They fold flat, and seem indestructible, made of recycled plastic bottles. We’ll never go back to other kinds of bags. — KK

Google’s algorithm is not working as well as it once did for product recommendations. It could be that spammy websites have gotten better at gaming the algorithm, pushing their search results to the top. My friend Rob Beschizza shared a wonderful tip. He tweeted, “a search for ‘best cordless hedge trimmer’ gets 400 identical top lists of amazon referral links with smarmy PR copy. But “‘best cordless hedge trimmer reddit’ gets the best cordless hedge trimmer.” Try it, it works for any product! — MF

When researching a product online, type in the item in Google and then add “vs”. Google will auto-complete with the most popular, and highly rated, alternatives, and the top link will educate you quickly. Then “vs” autocomplete the new item and you’ll have a good sense of the field. — KK

We’ve previously recommended Fakespot, a website that grades Amazon products for their shill, fake review, or fraud factors. These grades are not foolproof, but are extremely useful. What’s new is their Fakespot extension for the Chrome browser, which overlays your Amazon pages with their grades for all the related and recommended products shown on a page. This means you don’t have to leave the Amazon page to see the grades, and it also means you will see product grades before you click on them. It’s behavior changing. — KK

I always need a refresher course when it comes time to wrapping gifts, and there are a lot of instructional videos on Youtube, but most are too complicated for me. This basic gift wrapping video is helpful and I learned that all this time I was forgetting to fold over the edges before I taped them down. Also helpful is this video on how to tie a bow perfectly. I start at minute 1:11 and watch at 1.5x speed to get through it. — CD