Pack This One Item To Keep Headphone Wires Tangle-Free In Your Luggage

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You're at the airport, waiting to get through security. You grab a tray and haphazardly stuff your electronics in, then race through security to get to your items before someone else does. When you get there, you see what looks like six shoelaces tied together and tumble washed, but it's actually just your headphones. We've all been there. Packing can be stressful, whether you've taken several suitcases full of clothes or tried to pack everything into one carry-on, and earphones are notorious for getting tangled if you so much as breathe on them. But there's one easy way to keep your headphones tangle-free: Use a binder clip.

Binder clips are a useful and space-saving packing hack for keeping your headphone wires untangled, as they're sturdy enough to hold the wires even if they get knocked around. All you have to do is hold the clip open and put the cord in with both earbuds on one side. The part of the wire cord inside the clip should be right under the earbuds, preventing them from flopping around. Close the clip and loop the rest of the cord around the outside of the two metal arms. Once you get to the last bit of the wire, push the earphone jack through the metal arms to seal everything in place. Make sure you don't wrap the wire too tightly; you want it secure, but loose enough to prevent the outer insulation layer from stretching and tearing. You can also simply loop the earphone wires and use the clip part to hold them in place.

Even though wired headphones are a necessity on most flights, it's annoying when they insist on getting impossibly tangled. A 2007 paper titled "Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, explains that strings that get "agitated" (aka, thrown around in a confined space) tend to form into knots within seconds. The longer and more flexible the string, the more knotted it becomes. Although the researchers for this paper used string, the same principle applies to earphones. Headphone wires are deliberately made extra flexible and long to account for human behavior; many people keep their phones in their pockets while listening to music through their earphones or fall asleep listening to a podcast. "Earphones are a particularly tangly type of string because of their length and bendiness," explains Dr. Niraj Lal, a physics scholar, in an ABC Science video. "The earbuds on the Y branch ... lead to more opportunities for criss-crossing."

Binder clips allow you to keep your headphones tangle-free by holding the earbuds in place — preventing them from crossing each other — and creating loops with the wire that are wide enough to prevent them from tangling, while still being small and contained. We recommend large-size binder clips, like the ones in the Acco 12-Pack Binder Clips Box or the Amazon Basics 48-Count Binder Clips. These are small enough to fit in your carry-ons but big enough to hold long or thick wires. You can also use them to secure your headphone's detachable cables by looping them and using the clip to hold the wires in place.