Some travelers are skeptical about packing cubes, viewing them like unnecessary extra weight or a waste of time compared to just throwing everything into the main compartment. However, once a person has tried them out for themselves, the benefits become obvious. Everyone from one-bag families to business people have embraced the packing cube as a way to keep weight down and generally make travel significantly easier.
When abroad or on the move, the basics of everyday life become more difficult. You are limited in what you can carry and things can easily become lost in the depths of your bag or left behind altogether at the last hotel room. If you are traveling full time, then this kind of disorganization represents wasted hours and could have a negative impact on your career through lost productivity. Give packing cubes a go and see for yourself how they make travel easier so that you have more time and energy to dedicate to other things.
How a Packing Cube Saves Space
Although the amount of space in a bag doesn’t change, you can fit more items or fewer depending upon how it is organized. For instance, if you put smaller clothes, such as underwear, in first and then add something larger like a raincoat on top, then there will be empty air cavities left unfilled beneath the larger item, leaving you with less space for the rest of the packing. Conversely, if you start with the bigger stuff, then you can plug any gaps with small, soft clothing afterward and maximize space usage.
This is just one example of how the way in which you pack impacts on how much space it takes up. If you place all your items into a set of packing cubes, it becomes even easier to pack in the most efficient way. No matter how full your packing cube is, it will maintain its shape, leaving you to try out different configurations until you find the one that fits the best. Try turning them sideways, strapping them down or stacking them vertically to see how the total amount of space left free grows and shrinks.
Packing cubes will also, in general, stay where you put them, rather than mixing themselves up as you travel, undoing all that hard organization work. The packing cubes from Arcido are designed to perfectly fit inside Arcido backpacks, meaning that half the work is already done and making it no problem at all to fit them into your bag efficiently.
The other way that packing cubes can save plenty of space is in the compression of your clothing. It is not just the air around your items that takes up the volume of your main compartment, but the air within them as well, especially when it comes to soft things like clothes that can be squashed and flattened. Stuffing everything into a packing cube and then zipping it tightly closed, knocks all the air out so that their total volume is minimized.
To further compress your clothes and other soft items like towels to the smallest size possible, many packing cubes come with an extra zipper. This pulls the top and bottom of the cube together so that as much air is squeezed out as possible. If you’ve never tried this, you will be amazed at how a large pile of clothes becomes a neat and compact package. By choosing a product like Arcido which is made with the most durable YKK zips, you can keep stuffing more items without fear of the zips breaking. This means you can squeeze the absolute most out of your packing cube. With the imminent release of the Oxna, you can also purchase a tailor-made compression cube, allowing you to bring the same amount of stuff but in a smaller bag.
Packing cubes like the ones from Arcido are made of an ultra-lightweight material, so the addition to weight is negligible. However, you may still see this as extra bulk, especially once you have arrived at your destination and unpacked everything into the hotel closet. Well, this has been thought about too, with the Arcido cubes packing into themselves, so that they fold up into a tiny package that can be stored away and forgotten about until the next time you need to pack your bags and head off on another adventure.
How a Packing Cube Saves Time
Space is one thing, but the most important benefit of using packing cubes is that they are a huge time saver. By filling a large main compartment of a backpack with several smaller compartments, you can keep a separation between your items. For instance, one cube could be dedicated to underwear and T-shirts, while another larger packing cube holds your pants, sweaters, and shirts, and a third, thinner one houses small electronics and chargers. This will mark the end of losing your socks inside other larger clothing, with the cube holding it all in place.
Once you arrive at your destination, there is no need to unpack each item individually, but simply remove the packing cubes you don’t need and get on with your day. Similarly, if you keep your items in packing cubes in your hotel room, then you just need to place the cubes back into your backpack before you leave. For busy digital nomads who have limited time to work, cutting down on packing and unpacking can make a significant difference. When you need a specific item, you only need to rifle through one cube instead of an entire backpack. Not that much rifling will be needed since the item will have stayed exactly where you put it within the cube.
Packing cubes are ultimately all about organization and organization is the basis of time management. No time will be wasted searching for your phone charger when it’s about to die or your toothpaste when you’re rushing in the morning to leave the hotel before the checkout deadline. As long as you can remember which packing cube the item is in, or can see where it is through the mesh that Arcido uses on top of all their packing cubes, then you will immediately be able to find and use any item. If productivity is important to you, then you need a set of packing cubes.
You also save time by being able to bring a smaller backpack. This means that you can always keep your bag down to a carry on size, so that no time is wasted checking bags in or picking them up at the baggage claim. Once at your destination, you won’t be searching around for a locker or safe place to store your bag. Its small size means that you are mobile and able to enter museums or restaurants without feeling self-conscious or being asked to leave. This means that the second your plane touches down, you can get on with doing whatever you need to do.
The two biggest benefits of packing cubes are that they save space and they save time. They do this, however, in many different ways. For such a simple invention, it is incredible how much difference packing cubes can make to your life. No more struggling to fit items in your bag, failing to keep it organized, or time wasted looking for the things you need. Turbocharge your productivity by investing in packing cubes and watch how they really can change everything.