A lot of us don’t wear sunscreen nearly as often as we should. Sometimes that’s because we don’t reapply it often enough (you should slather on more every two hours you are out and about in the sun, and more often if you’re swimming) or we don’t apply as much as we really need in the first place (you should be using more than an ounce if you’re covering your beachwear-clad body from head to toe).

But sometimes we don’t apply sunscreen simply because there isn’t a bottle handy. You might forget about grabbing sunscreen until you leave the house, for example—and by then it’s too late to run back home and get the bottle out of the bathroom cabinet. If you do remember to toss your sunscreen into your purse, backpack or beach bag, it’s likely to stay there until the next morning (or, let’s be honest, for the next three days), meaning you’re more than likely to tell yourself you don’t have time to go digging for it even if it does occur to you to put some on.

There is, of course, one obvious solution. Buy multiple bottles of sunscreen in various sizes and leave one everywhere you might find yourself needing sunscreen.

A bottle in the bathroom. A bottle in the car. A tiny bottle on your keychain, a travel-sized bottle in your purse or backpack and a mega-sized bottle in your beach bag.

Productivity expert Laura Vanderkam recently explained how this method helped her family wear more sunscreen:

Theoretically, we could just keep a giant spray bottle and tube in the mudroom, since that’s where we generally exit the house. But over the years, I have learned that the sunscreen is more likely to make it out of the bottle and onto bodies if it is ridiculously convenient. And so, we now have a stash by the backdoor, ready for anyone going into the back yard. We also have a bottle on the back porch, in case anyone made it out the back door without noticing the stash. We have bottles in the cars. Kids going to camp? They get tubes in their bags. A little extra means we’re not hunting around. We’re not moving the sunscreen from place to place. And so it gets used.

Placing a bottle of sunscreen everywhere you might need it is like leaving a gift for your future self. I’ve been putting separate bottles of sunscreen in my bathroom, purse and backpack for years, and I can’t tell you how many times having an extra tube of the stuff around has saved my skin. So, if you can afford to stock up on multiple sunscreen bottles, start stashing them everywhere: in bathrooms, mudrooms, backpacks, beach totes, glove compartments, hipster fanny packs and anywhere else you think you could use one.

Image: Arturs Budkevics (Shutterstock)

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