I often find myself facing a big pile of unsorted resistors and needing to put them all back where they belong. Now, you might be thinking that this is easy work for a Specialist like me. I have all those resistor color codes memorized, right? Well, you’d be confusing me for someone else.

Even an awesome Specialist such as myself has limits to his patience. I can’t sit around all day, clipping multimeter leads to resistors, one at a time. I have curtains to maim. So, I came up with a bit of a shortcut. It works for me, so maybe it will work for you, too.

First thing I do is get one of his fancy breadboards. The kind with the banana clip power terminals. He always has his wired up so that the power rails on the left and right are connected to the power terminals.

The black terminal is wired to all four sets of power rails and is used as ground. That’s the one that I use. Then I put all the resistors into that ground rail, standing straight up and down.

If you’re still following along, you might have figured out where I’m going with this. One end of each resistor is now connected to a common point, which is also connected to the banana jack terminal.

Now all I have to do is connect one lead from my multimeter to that terminal. Then I can use the other lead to measure each resistor. Clipping the lead to end that isn’t connected to the breadboard.

Maybe this isn’t mind-blowing or life changing, but I do find that it saves time. Every minute saved cleaning up the Mechlabrat’s mess is a minute earned for more exciting endeavors.

When your life span–and attention span, for that matter–is as short as mine, every minute counts. There’s always a… Hold up. I see a curtain that needs destroying.