Posted on December 28, 2005 at 2:57 PM in how-to
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
The how-to portion of this how-to is very very short:
For the beginner: Adopt at least one life hack. Today is fine, or January 2nd would work too.
For the expert: Less reading about them and grinning smugly, more putting them to use.
A life hack is a little trick or technique that helps you stay organized, save time, or automate tedious work. What it isn't is a big new system or complicated computer application that will mess up the current way you have of doing things.
In their purest form life hacks are often blindingly simple, like "Check your e-mail three times a day, and only three times a day." My personal definition also includes things that aren't really productivity or organization tips, but just simple tricks for successful living, like "Smile while talking on the phone and you will seem more friendly."
You can find tons of good life hack suggestions at 43 Folders and Lifehacker.
In this context, a hack is a simple, often surprising way to cut through what would otherwise require a lot of red tape. It's two little steps that replace seven painstaking steps.
My search for the origin of the the term led me to an interview with its creator, Danny O'Brien. At an industry conference in 2004, O'Brien gave a public talk about the working habits of geek programmers. He and others had noticed that they work extremely smartly, and that they exert lots of energy up front writing tiny little scripts and programs to make their daily jobs easier. He found interesting commonalities between the little tricks that different programmers use, and believed that similar thinking could be applied to solving the kinds of problems that everyone faces in their daily work and personal life.
Linked in the interview is a set of informal notes that Cory Doctorow took at O'Brien's lecture. I'm not sure whether to credit the lecturer or the notetaker or both, but I found the notes simply brilliant once I got through the shorthand. If any of the language or abbreviations in them are too confusing to get through, feel free to paste a passage into the comments here and we can make sense of it.
There's also a video clip available of a later version of the presentation. It's the fourth main item on the page.
In my del.icio.us bookmarks, I keep things I come across that feel like life hacks to me. These aren't all time-savers; they are also just simple life improvement tips. Here are a few things I have in there right now:
Comments
At my first job out of college, I got a bonus after I spent several hours turning a plain document into a mail merge document. When people congratulated me, I said I was just lazy. I didn't want to spend 15 minutes searching for and replacing information every time I needed to create a new contract, especially when I could put the same information into merge fields in less than 5 minutes.
Posted by Tracy | December 28, 2005 4:39 PM