5 Gadgets that are saviours for the unorganised

I hear there are men who enjoy mowing the garden (and getting things out the loft, or emptying the bins), but I’m not one of them. In our gaff, I’m just as likely to be doing the dusting while my girlfriend mows the lawn.

So we need a mower that’s not massively heavy and doesn’t require a big, manly tug to kick into life. This monster looks like Robocop, but is built on a light frame and has a handle that minimises vibrations.

Best of all, there are no trailing cables, as it’s powered by an 56v lithium ion battery that recharges in minutes. And, by God, can it mow!

Read more: 5 Ways to keep your lawn pristine

Pasta substitutes (courgetti spaghetti, etc) have been a hit in the supermarkets this summer, so spiralizers are having something of a renaissance.

Lakeland’s premium product comes with no less than four easily switchable blades to achieve different thicknesses (though no spaghetti-hoop function, regrettably).

I must admit that on my first attempt, I found myself shredding rather than spiralizing, covered my kitchen floor with butternut-squash residue and sliced off some of my thumb. But after a bit of practice, I was whizzing up salads so sanctimonious they’d sit comfortably on Gwyneth Paltrow’s blog.

Bitter experience of angrily traversing car parks in the rain has taught me to always make a mental note of where I’ve parked.

Occasionally I still forget, or discover that the street I parked on in daylight looks utterly different at night. Zus to the rescue.

This GPS-enabled USB charger plugs into my car’s cigarette lighter, syncs to my smartphone and, every time I turn the engine off, sends my parking location to an app on my phone. A time—and sanity—saver.

It's great that my phone can hold thousands of photos, but it takes ages to scroll through them all. The Roll is an elegant solution.

Its image-recognition software analyses the content of your camera roll, and divides your photos into albums for speedy access.

Plus, it prioritises the best-composed shots in a series—so you needn’t go through them all to find that fab one of your cat.

This app is a seamless, jaw-dropping blend of technology and productivity. It digitises words from a printed page into your mobile phone— so you can point your phone at an article in this magazine, and after a couple of taps be pasting that text into an email.

One more tap and you can translate the text into 60 languages, with no need for internet access. Amazing.

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Read more from our columnist Olly Mann

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