Drilling holes without making a mess

When you drill a hole in a wall, the excess comes out and needs to go somewhere. Traditionally, you use a vacuum to suck it up while drilling, but that takes an extra hand or some helper. There are also ring-shaped catchers which go around the drill, and I've used them with varying degrees of success in the past. I guess most of us have seen the hack to put a folded post-it note below the place where you drill, but that never really worked for me either. It is just too flimsy, I often dunked the contents when trying to take it off and to the bin. Maybe that is a Europe problem, where walls are made from bricks instead of wood. Anyway, the theory behind it is certainly sound, even if execution always seemed lacking for me.

However, today I installed a shelf above my bed, which had white linen on it, and I really did not want to get red brick dust on it, or spend the time to cover it completely. In addition, I was balancing on a super fluffy bed with an impact driver and did not have any hands to spare. I did however have an old cardboard box and painters tape sitting around.

It is a box taped to a wall. What did you expect?

Overall, this worked great. Everything dropped directly into the box, no cleanup other than taking the box to the trash was necessary, and it was even possible to reuse the tape to glue the box to several positions along the wall where I wanted to drill. I think my solution is obvious, but way better than any other I'd tried so far, so I thought I'd share.