> Maybe all the time I spend looking for better ways to do things is keeping me from, well, doing things.
Eureka!
People are complicating their lives just to decomplicate later. It's a vicious cycle designed to keep the market flowing. Needs are created in real time, we don't even know why we need certain things any more. We live under the anxiety created by the excess of excess.
With 99% of the so called "life hacks", we're just trying to eliminate a problem that we created by another "life hack". Oh a nice trick to keep the iPhone doing X? Cool! Why did I need X in the first place again??? I don't remember. And the iPhone...why did I buy it? I just play a silly game and use the contacts list most of the time.
There is a:
99% chance you don't need your email available 24x7
99% chance you don't need a new car
99% chance you don't need a cell phone turned on 24x7
99% chance that 99% of the shit ton of information you gather daily will be thrown out of your brain in just a few weeks
99% chance you don't need a stupid GPS guiding what you do, where you drive
99.99% chance you don't really need a new iPad, iThis, iThat, HTC that, whatever
99% chance you don't need the extra U$ 1000 on your sallary
99% chance you didn't need to be tweeting or checking your email while there was a nice person sitting next to you while you waited at the airport
99% chance you don't need to be all you can be better richer faster more
This is why the world is turning into a bunch of control freaky, unhappy, lonely, greedy and unhealthy bunch of individuals.
I discovered this one day. I said fuck it and went for a walk at the park. Since then, I've done the same thing daily and I don't miss the other 1567 things I used to do on the Internet instead of having a silly walk at the park.
"Life hacking" is a term that repels me. Modern life's demands are often insane. You don't hack it, instead you should run away as far as possible.
Most current work environments consist of 8 hour long streams of interruptions. You could say that dealing with the interruptions is the actual work now, and the work that you were supposed to do has been relegated to being a nuisance.
Of course, this results in the birth of the entire GTD and "life hacking" fads, because people foolishly believe that this mess is somehow manageable.
What you describe above could be seen as withdrawal symptoms from persistent hyper-stimulation and hyper-responsiveness. People are so used to constant external stimuli that require attention and feedback at the workplace, that they need to recreate these situations at home.
I think that in this regard, television is an old medium, because it is content with you just sitting on your lazy ass.
Yeah, it's kind of funny how everyone thinks that because I'm a computer programmer I must have a fancy phone with a data plan and always return all my calls and texts and everything immediately. Not that I can blame them, in my experience many of my peers are that way.
It's irritating how sites like LifeHacker imply that you need to be going 100mph all day every day, working with the latest gadgets using the latest technology to make more money to buy more stuff.
Maybe some of us are perfectly fine just working our day job on our line of business software and then going home and hanging out with our families and playing with our dogs.
I still have LifeHacker on my iGoogle homepage, but I rarely actually read the articles aside from the "top download for the week" ones, which are sometimes interesting just to see what new stuff is out there.
The main problem is that most of their "hacks" are written in such a way that implies that you are WASTING YOUR LIFE if you aren't following some kind of strict 37 Signals approved code and micro-managing every aspect of everything to death.
I kind of wish "life hacks" as we know them today could be replaced with a simple set of tricks, such as "melt a pen cap to remove weird screws" or "blanch onions to make peeling them easier". A blending of classic tricks (like the onions) and modern tricks (pen cap).
99% chance you don't need a cell phone turned on 24x7
Agreed, my phone automatically powers off at 11PM and on at 7:30AM, and I barely ever notice. I do notice the improved battery life though.
99% chance you don't need a stupid GPS guiding what you do, where you drive
While true, the cost of a GPS unit is so low it is easy to throw one in the glove box for that 1% when you do need it.
I agree with you, but don't understand the OP. Why does he stick to the "life hacker" term at all? The lifehacker blog is terrible, but we have always defended the term "hacker" against popular interpretations (=cracker). Can we still save the term "life hacker"? For me, that'd be someone without a cellphone.
There's a actually an established term for most of your list: Early Adopters. A marketing euphemism for people who waste their life and money trying out products you throw at them. It can be fun, but when I see people on Twitter with that term in their bio, I can't help but facepalm.
And then there's another group of people - those who tune their tools forever.
Both obsessions are incredibly common on HN. One harmless case in point, this submission on the front page left me clueless:
How many people on this planet have that many management duties that exchanging all stock apps is worth the time? Is it a Zen garden thing? (Sorry author - I have actually at half of those apps too :) )
The term Lifehack is just a catchy term to describe ways of optimising the things you do, that has slowly turned into a way of short-cutting things so you can fit even more stuff that isn't fun into your day.
Realistically, the only reason you should use lifehacks is to free your time up for things you enjoy. I occasionally use the pomodoro technique to get things done, but gave up massive GTD lists a long time ago.
I used to use super-organised lists and manage my time GTD-style, but I found that the big problem was whatever I did, there was always more stuff to do. In the end I just left it. No matter what I do work-wise, there will always be more. All you can do is set time limits and work within them.
Nowadays I just use Wunderlist to list what I currently need to do that's urgent, then cut off at 6pm. I never take phone calls after 8pm unless it's from my wife or family, which makes my life a whole lot simpler outside of work. The only downside is that I typically work a 6 day week. Still working on that, but I'm grateful that what I do for work is mostly actually fun.
Life hacking might sometimes be what my grandfather called "working to get out of work" or rather, doing a lot of fiddling in order to avoid actual work.
This is kind of why most startups I see, or at least, with web apps, I think will do nothing.
The other thing with most of them and almost society in general now is this great congregating of all things whilst not improving. There's an amusing selfishness that's hypocritically common now too.
I also wonder how exactly they're measuring their lives. By the amount of trivial things they get done? By how efficiently they can read a message on the internet? A lot of it comes down to 'neat party tricks.'
If I don't want to do it, it doesn't make me money, and its not a family obligation, I don't do it.
How I hack email:
Employees and close friends get my email address. No one else should have it.
How I hack my phone:
Employees, close friends, and attractive girls have it. I never answer an unknown number. I never return a call from a company, they have to send something in writing.
How I hack making phone calls to companies:
Personal assistant does it.
How I hack snail mail:
My lawyer picks it up once a week, important stuff I see eventually.
Lifehacking isn't about optimizing an annoying task, its about not doing it.
My current smartphone is at the manufacturer getting repaired, it has been 3 weeks now. In the meantime I picked up one of those cheap-as-all-hell-pay-as-you-go-phones...
In three weeks I've needed to charge it one time... considering how little I actually use my phone I've spent about $20 on minutes and I haven't used half of them yet.
I'll actually be a little sad when my smartphone comes back, I'm thinking about telling the manufacturer to just keep it.
Learn to live a more mindful live... google mindfulness and so on... get into this (minus the esoteric crap) and you will be amazed what changes it can bring.
One of the interesting things about lifehacking is that it seems to be one of those things where "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" - kind of like the kid who takes Philosophy 101, learns a little bit about syllogisms and formal deductive fallacies like ad hominems, and goes around being obnoxious while never realizing that actually, most deductive fallacies are valid inductive arguments. (If a Nobel physicist claims something about a random point in quantum mechanics, he really is more likely to be correct than a guy sitting next to you on the bus, even though if you wrote this down on a syllogism test, this would be flagged as an 'argument from authority'.) We might call this "the valley of bad rationality" http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Valley_of_bad_rationality
In the case of lifehacking, it's more a case of "the valley of bad economics": of knowing just enough economics to understand that saving time is valuable and worth paying for upfront, but not being good enough to take the analysis any further and consider things like 1) how much time you are actually saving on net, 2) how long you are likely to be using any system and receiving the gains you paid for, 3) and whether you might not be overestimating both figures.
Frequently, you find that even large apparent gains are not actually justified solely on the basis of saving time because of the uncertainty and discounting of future gains you need to do.
The striking thing is that even the most dramatic self-experiments like using melatonin to improve my sleep did not justify very time-consuming (and more reliable) experiments, and the most efficient thing to do would just take melatonin on the strength of my background information and subjective impressions of efficacy.
In regards to your first paragraph: I understand your sentiments, but speaking of "argument from authority" in specific...
I always took this to mean that we can't believe something just because an expert says it. In other words, an expert should be more correct than the guy on the bus, but an argument needs to stand on its own -- it doesn't really matter who says it.
So you wouldn't be flagged for saying the Nobel physicist is more likely to be correct. You would be flagged if you said he is correct because he's a Nobel physicist.
Is my understanding correct? Disclaimer: I've never taken any Philosophy class. :)
There's a reason why Steven Covey's "7 Habits" is such a popular book, and it's because it delivers a fantastic framework - not a list of 1000 self-help tips - for building a life organized around your principles.
He spends a whole chapter talking about the tyranny of the "urgent" and how we often allow it to crowd out the "important"... and how essential it is to plan/balance the necessity of one vs. the desires of the other.
I think I realized this intuitively when I was about 20 or so, but when you have your principles defined and commit to them daily, everything else flows from there... When you have a driving purpose in life, everything from confidence to leadership to relational skills to technical skills and even your desire for being physically in-shape all develop and naturally flow out from your overarching desire to meet that purpose. Covey calls it "true north", and it's a great metaphor -- when you know "true north", all paths that don't bring you in that direction immediately and quickly become irrelevant to your life.
Even better, you rarely need self-help books along the way, simply because life will teach you all the unique lessons and tricks you need to learn as you strive intentionally towards that mission.
With that said, once you've decided that you're doing things that matter, hack away, because time is still the currency of life.
On the other hand, one of Covey's habits is "sharpen the saw." Which is just another metaphor for Lifehacking. If you take a few minutes to optimize your tool, your work will be easier. On the other hand, if you spend your day sharpening the saw, at some point it's not going to get usably sharper, and you're just wasting time. You've got to find a way to strike the balance.
I'm not in control of my email inbox; the thing fills up faster than I can deal with it. From a GTD lifehacking perspective this is bad. From a normal human perspective this is bad; I don't like to feel that I am perpetually disappointing people by not responding to them quickly.
I could put a lot of time and effort into getting it under control and keeping it under control. In fact I've tried a few times, although it always reverted back to out of control as soon as I got busy again.
Re-read that last sentence--I let it go "as soon as I got busy again." It took me a while but I realized that this is actually my own healthy attitude about email...it's not what keeps me busy. My real work is what keeps me busy, or my family, or my friends. Email is what I fit in around the real stuff I do.
I've accepted that email management means simply choosing who to disappoint on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. In a way it's flattering that all these people want my attention and efforts. But it's not sustainable. So I've consciously tried to shift my mental energy from trying to "fix" my email, to simply trying to make the best decisions about who to disappoint as I go along with my real work.
Yeah, the most important part of managing your e-mail is training people not to e-mail you 10 times a day expecting prompt responses, especially for things that are not really urgent.
The prevalence of cell phones and always-available internet has led a lot of people to believe that you need to always take every phone call, always respond to every text and e-mail.
I've developed a habit of waiting at least a day or two before responding to e-mails and phone calls. Let the message bounce around in your brain for a few days and actually make a well reasoned response.
You'd be amazed how often problems will resolve themselves, and training people not to expect you to respond immediately 24/7 will gradually reduce the amount of stuff you get sent.
Wow I could have written this same exact blog post. "Maybe all the time I spend looking for better ways to do things is keeping me from, well, doing things." This realization also hit me not too long ago. Everything had to be setup just right, I had to know every little detail, and it had to be done efficiently. However, I realized I was getting absolutely nothing done. I learned much more and got more things done by just jumping into whatever I needed to accomplish.
I've recently noticed that less planning and 'life hacking' in certain areas of my life have opened doors to more progress. For example, my desk at home. I used to have to have it sparse and minimal. Nothing could be on it but my keyboard, mouse, monitor and laptop. So, I'd spend time every day or week cleaning it off, making sure nothing ever got it on it, actually getting distracted from what I was working on for fear of something getting on my desk.
Around the first of the year I read a post about 'minimal porn' and 'desk porn' and it made me feel really petty and stupid. So, I decided to let my desk 'live and let live'. Whatever ended up on my desk (within reason) could stay. After a week or so, I was over the minimal desk thing. It never even crosses my mind now. My desk is for work and concentration, not staging of photos.
It's about finding a balance. I can't stand a cluttered desk, but I'm a cluttered person, generally. I take care of it by swiping everything off my desk once every other week and into the bin. If I can't immediately think of a reason to save something from the carnage, it's probably not important at all anymore.
I've yet to be burned by this and I take the approach to my closets at home, too. While spring cleaning, if I can't remember seeing some item in the last year, it goes to goodwill. My wife used to freak out about sentimental things, but she's come around. They're just things. If they're really that sentimental, put them someplace you can admire them every day.
You can solve this in a simple way: Spend a fixed percentage of your time on fixing your tools, the rest on the actual work. The fixed portion should not exceed 20% or so.
Like that you stay productive and you incrementally improve your work environment.
Obsessing over your work environment is just as counterproductive as obsessing over the work itself. A healthy balance is the main ingredient to increasing productivity in the longer term.
But how long do you spend setting up the time-tracking process that ensures you don't exceed you 20% time frame in a given day/week/month/year? And don't you also have to track that time as tool-time? How do you even do that without your time-tracking system up and running?!
Facetious, i know - but this is a confessional, the OP is basically saying he isn't capable of separating his time out like that - he would get drawn into the optimization process - like an addiction and blow past he's 20% allotment.
If a person is able to maintain the don't go over 20% of your time on optimization then by definition they aren't dealing with the same issue as the OP.
The key is to combine "minimalistic living" with life hacks. Reduce your life down to the essentials, then use life hacks to go even further.
For example: you probably won't get away without paying your bills so a "life hack" that automates that process will take another load of your shoulders.'
On the other hand, a "life hack" for storing "all your stuff" might not be as good as simply "get rid of all your crap"
Also good point about life design, there's not much point in "saving x minutes" or earning "x dollars" if you don't do anything useful and worthwhile with it
All in all the most important thing is to have a process, call it kaizen, constant improvement, or whatever. Try different things, measure / see what works, learn from the mistakes, rinse - repeat
It always puzzles me to read my own impression and un-articulated feelings written down by someone else way better than I'm at thinking about them less writing them down!
And yet another post for my list of HN post that had the biggest impact. Thumbs up!
I've stopped watching televisionm listening to radio, movies, or even browsing the internet. In fact, I disconnected the cable service, and told my internet provider to take a hike.
My life? A hundred times better. I can now focus. I play with my daughter for at least an hour every day. I've lost more than a hundred pounds. I now run marathons. I program like a madman. And I was able to begin doing my own startup (which is about to launch my first MVP).
Have I missed anything? No.I'd say I'm now living, instead of just being here.
Try it out. It works.
Edited to fix formatting. Sorry for the annoying one line paragraphs.
When you are a programmer you always want to improve things. I have little python scripts for common tasks everywhere.
One of the things I have never tried to improve is my email. I check my personal email once a day, and almost never in the weekends. When I see a long email that takes a long time to make a point, I stop reading and go to the next. Some people don't really like it when I do this, but it keeps me sane.
The one time I tried to check my email more often and respond more often the amount of email I got exploded and I decided to stop.
Yesterday I had a discussion with someone about answering email. In which I said "Ten years ago a lot of people didn't even have an email address or a mobile phone and a lot of people didn't want one. Everything went fine without it". Sometimes I make myself feel old :P.
I sometimes think the world would be a better place without email and mobile phones, life would be a lot more relaxed. The only way to deal with them is to not use them as much as possible.
Should you spend 40 hours customizing your e-mail solution? Probably not.
Should you spend 1 hour and get it to an efficient state? Why the hell not. It'll save you some time later on.
This article is an overcorrection to a problem which stemmed from a lack of balance. The thing itself is not bad (engineering systems for your life), the imbalance of over-engineering was bad.
So yes, lifehacking to the extreme such that you spend more time working on systems than using those systems is probably a bad thing. But living your life as though no system could aid it is just as bad.
If you read GTD with the idea that David was a very eastern-religion influenced guy and studied martial arts and meditation, you sort of get this intuitively. There's a limit; a zen about it.
Don't over-engineer your life. Balance it using the tools available to you, so your tools just work and you don't have to think about the tools anymore. If you're spending too much time on the tools, you're doing it wrong.
The ultimate lifehacking is going from rag to riches by selling a completely useless "item" that some people find extremely valuable, thus further inflating it's perceived value.
You probably don't need much to do it, and the revenues from the sale will allow you to go around most of the obstacles that the vast majority of people have to go through in this life.
As with most trends, the thought starts off honest and well-intentioned and then grows into a sort of anti-self. See also: minimalism, GTD, moleskines.
In many ways, I think the key is not to sell your heart into something too quickly or even at all. Also, let other people be the early adopters -- examine their successes and failures.
Be ruthless about the tools you use and the methods you use. If they're too cumbersome, ditch them.
I often wonder if the frustration with this encumbrance is whether its because for a lot of things, digital tools aren't the best choice. Or at least some digital paradigms aren't, such as Omnifocus and Evernote vs. a rough paper analog such as Notational Velocity.
We can start living simpler life with fewer needs and be content and happy until some more aggressive, more ambitious people come and destroy us, as happened to some in history.
[+] [-] josefonseca|14 years ago|reply
Eureka!
People are complicating their lives just to decomplicate later. It's a vicious cycle designed to keep the market flowing. Needs are created in real time, we don't even know why we need certain things any more. We live under the anxiety created by the excess of excess.
With 99% of the so called "life hacks", we're just trying to eliminate a problem that we created by another "life hack". Oh a nice trick to keep the iPhone doing X? Cool! Why did I need X in the first place again??? I don't remember. And the iPhone...why did I buy it? I just play a silly game and use the contacts list most of the time.
There is a:
99% chance you don't need your email available 24x7
99% chance you don't need a new car
99% chance you don't need a cell phone turned on 24x7
99% chance that 99% of the shit ton of information you gather daily will be thrown out of your brain in just a few weeks
99% chance you don't need a stupid GPS guiding what you do, where you drive
99.99% chance you don't really need a new iPad, iThis, iThat, HTC that, whatever
99% chance you don't need the extra U$ 1000 on your sallary
99% chance you didn't need to be tweeting or checking your email while there was a nice person sitting next to you while you waited at the airport
99% chance you don't need to be all you can be better richer faster more
This is why the world is turning into a bunch of control freaky, unhappy, lonely, greedy and unhealthy bunch of individuals.
I discovered this one day. I said fuck it and went for a walk at the park. Since then, I've done the same thing daily and I don't miss the other 1567 things I used to do on the Internet instead of having a silly walk at the park.
[+] [-] kitsune_|14 years ago|reply
Most current work environments consist of 8 hour long streams of interruptions. You could say that dealing with the interruptions is the actual work now, and the work that you were supposed to do has been relegated to being a nuisance.
Of course, this results in the birth of the entire GTD and "life hacking" fads, because people foolishly believe that this mess is somehow manageable.
What you describe above could be seen as withdrawal symptoms from persistent hyper-stimulation and hyper-responsiveness. People are so used to constant external stimuli that require attention and feedback at the workplace, that they need to recreate these situations at home.
I think that in this regard, television is an old medium, because it is content with you just sitting on your lazy ass.
[+] [-] bradwestness|14 years ago|reply
It's irritating how sites like LifeHacker imply that you need to be going 100mph all day every day, working with the latest gadgets using the latest technology to make more money to buy more stuff.
Maybe some of us are perfectly fine just working our day job on our line of business software and then going home and hanging out with our families and playing with our dogs.
I still have LifeHacker on my iGoogle homepage, but I rarely actually read the articles aside from the "top download for the week" ones, which are sometimes interesting just to see what new stuff is out there.
The main problem is that most of their "hacks" are written in such a way that implies that you are WASTING YOUR LIFE if you aren't following some kind of strict 37 Signals approved code and micro-managing every aspect of everything to death.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
99% chance you don't need a cell phone turned on 24x7
Agreed, my phone automatically powers off at 11PM and on at 7:30AM, and I barely ever notice. I do notice the improved battery life though.
99% chance you don't need a stupid GPS guiding what you do, where you drive
While true, the cost of a GPS unit is so low it is easy to throw one in the glove box for that 1% when you do need it.
[+] [-] gurkendoktor|14 years ago|reply
There's a actually an established term for most of your list: Early Adopters. A marketing euphemism for people who waste their life and money trying out products you throw at them. It can be fun, but when I see people on Twitter with that term in their bio, I can't help but facepalm.
And then there's another group of people - those who tune their tools forever.
Both obsessions are incredibly common on HN. One harmless case in point, this submission on the front page left me clueless:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4012862
How many people on this planet have that many management duties that exchanging all stock apps is worth the time? Is it a Zen garden thing? (Sorry author - I have actually at half of those apps too :) )
[+] [-] _b8r0|14 years ago|reply
Realistically, the only reason you should use lifehacks is to free your time up for things you enjoy. I occasionally use the pomodoro technique to get things done, but gave up massive GTD lists a long time ago.
I used to use super-organised lists and manage my time GTD-style, but I found that the big problem was whatever I did, there was always more stuff to do. In the end I just left it. No matter what I do work-wise, there will always be more. All you can do is set time limits and work within them.
Nowadays I just use Wunderlist to list what I currently need to do that's urgent, then cut off at 6pm. I never take phone calls after 8pm unless it's from my wife or family, which makes my life a whole lot simpler outside of work. The only downside is that I typically work a 6 day week. Still working on that, but I'm grateful that what I do for work is mostly actually fun.
[+] [-] GFischer|14 years ago|reply
I've got great plans for those (getting married, buying a house, having kids).
[+] [-] zecho|14 years ago|reply
The ultimate lifehack. Living it.
[+] [-] numeromancer|14 years ago|reply
Well, it's something to do 'til the undertaker comes.
http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/the-booklets/7.htm
[+] [-] jakejake|14 years ago|reply
I know I'm definitely guilty of this at times.
[+] [-] dorian-graph|14 years ago|reply
This is kind of why most startups I see, or at least, with web apps, I think will do nothing.
The other thing with most of them and almost society in general now is this great congregating of all things whilst not improving. There's an amusing selfishness that's hypocritically common now too.
I also wonder how exactly they're measuring their lives. By the amount of trivial things they get done? By how efficiently they can read a message on the internet? A lot of it comes down to 'neat party tricks.'
[+] [-] AJ007|14 years ago|reply
If I don't want to do it, it doesn't make me money, and its not a family obligation, I don't do it.
How I hack email:
Employees and close friends get my email address. No one else should have it.
How I hack my phone:
Employees, close friends, and attractive girls have it. I never answer an unknown number. I never return a call from a company, they have to send something in writing.
How I hack making phone calls to companies:
Personal assistant does it.
How I hack snail mail:
My lawyer picks it up once a week, important stuff I see eventually.
Lifehacking isn't about optimizing an annoying task, its about not doing it.
[+] [-] x1|14 years ago|reply
My current smartphone is at the manufacturer getting repaired, it has been 3 weeks now. In the meantime I picked up one of those cheap-as-all-hell-pay-as-you-go-phones...
In three weeks I've needed to charge it one time... considering how little I actually use my phone I've spent about $20 on minutes and I haven't used half of them yet.
I'll actually be a little sad when my smartphone comes back, I'm thinking about telling the manufacturer to just keep it.
[+] [-] dualogy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altrego99|14 years ago|reply
I wish I were part of this 99% :(
[+] [-] epicureanideal|14 years ago|reply
Have you SEEN Bay Area rent prices? I've got a decent salary and it still takes a big bite out of what's left after CA taxes.
[+] [-] tehayj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pumblechook|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwern|14 years ago|reply
In the case of lifehacking, it's more a case of "the valley of bad economics": of knowing just enough economics to understand that saving time is valuable and worth paying for upfront, but not being good enough to take the analysis any further and consider things like 1) how much time you are actually saving on net, 2) how long you are likely to be using any system and receiving the gains you paid for, 3) and whether you might not be overestimating both figures.
Frequently, you find that even large apparent gains are not actually justified solely on the basis of saving time because of the uncertainty and discounting of future gains you need to do.
To give some examples I recently worked through some numbers on various self-experiments I've done: http://lesswrong.com/lw/cih/value_of_information_8_examples/
The striking thing is that even the most dramatic self-experiments like using melatonin to improve my sleep did not justify very time-consuming (and more reliable) experiments, and the most efficient thing to do would just take melatonin on the strength of my background information and subjective impressions of efficacy.
[+] [-] jonmb|14 years ago|reply
I always took this to mean that we can't believe something just because an expert says it. In other words, an expert should be more correct than the guy on the bus, but an argument needs to stand on its own -- it doesn't really matter who says it.
So you wouldn't be flagged for saying the Nobel physicist is more likely to be correct. You would be flagged if you said he is correct because he's a Nobel physicist.
Is my understanding correct? Disclaimer: I've never taken any Philosophy class. :)
[+] [-] kirse|14 years ago|reply
He spends a whole chapter talking about the tyranny of the "urgent" and how we often allow it to crowd out the "important"... and how essential it is to plan/balance the necessity of one vs. the desires of the other.
I think I realized this intuitively when I was about 20 or so, but when you have your principles defined and commit to them daily, everything else flows from there... When you have a driving purpose in life, everything from confidence to leadership to relational skills to technical skills and even your desire for being physically in-shape all develop and naturally flow out from your overarching desire to meet that purpose. Covey calls it "true north", and it's a great metaphor -- when you know "true north", all paths that don't bring you in that direction immediately and quickly become irrelevant to your life.
Even better, you rarely need self-help books along the way, simply because life will teach you all the unique lessons and tricks you need to learn as you strive intentionally towards that mission.
With that said, once you've decided that you're doing things that matter, hack away, because time is still the currency of life.
[+] [-] DavidAdams|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|14 years ago|reply
I could put a lot of time and effort into getting it under control and keeping it under control. In fact I've tried a few times, although it always reverted back to out of control as soon as I got busy again.
Re-read that last sentence--I let it go "as soon as I got busy again." It took me a while but I realized that this is actually my own healthy attitude about email...it's not what keeps me busy. My real work is what keeps me busy, or my family, or my friends. Email is what I fit in around the real stuff I do.
I've accepted that email management means simply choosing who to disappoint on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. In a way it's flattering that all these people want my attention and efforts. But it's not sustainable. So I've consciously tried to shift my mental energy from trying to "fix" my email, to simply trying to make the best decisions about who to disappoint as I go along with my real work.
[+] [-] bradwestness|14 years ago|reply
The prevalence of cell phones and always-available internet has led a lot of people to believe that you need to always take every phone call, always respond to every text and e-mail.
I've developed a habit of waiting at least a day or two before responding to e-mails and phone calls. Let the message bounce around in your brain for a few days and actually make a well reasoned response.
You'd be amazed how often problems will resolve themselves, and training people not to expect you to respond immediately 24/7 will gradually reduce the amount of stuff you get sent.
[+] [-] itg|14 years ago|reply
"The perfect is the enemy of the good" - Voltaire
[+] [-] ZanderEarth32|14 years ago|reply
Around the first of the year I read a post about 'minimal porn' and 'desk porn' and it made me feel really petty and stupid. So, I decided to let my desk 'live and let live'. Whatever ended up on my desk (within reason) could stay. After a week or so, I was over the minimal desk thing. It never even crosses my mind now. My desk is for work and concentration, not staging of photos.
[+] [-] zecho|14 years ago|reply
I've yet to be burned by this and I take the approach to my closets at home, too. While spring cleaning, if I can't remember seeing some item in the last year, it goes to goodwill. My wife used to freak out about sentimental things, but she's come around. They're just things. If they're really that sentimental, put them someplace you can admire them every day.
[+] [-] jacquesm|14 years ago|reply
Like that you stay productive and you incrementally improve your work environment.
Obsessing over your work environment is just as counterproductive as obsessing over the work itself. A healthy balance is the main ingredient to increasing productivity in the longer term.
[+] [-] antoko|14 years ago|reply
Facetious, i know - but this is a confessional, the OP is basically saying he isn't capable of separating his time out like that - he would get drawn into the optimization process - like an addiction and blow past he's 20% allotment.
If a person is able to maintain the don't go over 20% of your time on optimization then by definition they aren't dealing with the same issue as the OP.
[+] [-] theorique|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulisesrmzroche|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattiask|14 years ago|reply
For example: you probably won't get away without paying your bills so a "life hack" that automates that process will take another load of your shoulders.'
On the other hand, a "life hack" for storing "all your stuff" might not be as good as simply "get rid of all your crap"
Also good point about life design, there's not much point in "saving x minutes" or earning "x dollars" if you don't do anything useful and worthwhile with it
All in all the most important thing is to have a process, call it kaizen, constant improvement, or whatever. Try different things, measure / see what works, learn from the mistakes, rinse - repeat
[+] [-] ulisesrmzroche|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hef19898|14 years ago|reply
And yet another post for my list of HN post that had the biggest impact. Thumbs up!
[+] [-] adambyrtek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmATinnovafy|14 years ago|reply
My life? A hundred times better. I can now focus. I play with my daughter for at least an hour every day. I've lost more than a hundred pounds. I now run marathons. I program like a madman. And I was able to begin doing my own startup (which is about to launch my first MVP).
Have I missed anything? No.I'd say I'm now living, instead of just being here.
Try it out. It works.
Edited to fix formatting. Sorry for the annoying one line paragraphs.
[+] [-] gcr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marblar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Proleps|14 years ago|reply
One of the things I have never tried to improve is my email. I check my personal email once a day, and almost never in the weekends. When I see a long email that takes a long time to make a point, I stop reading and go to the next. Some people don't really like it when I do this, but it keeps me sane.
The one time I tried to check my email more often and respond more often the amount of email I got exploded and I decided to stop.
Yesterday I had a discussion with someone about answering email. In which I said "Ten years ago a lot of people didn't even have an email address or a mobile phone and a lot of people didn't want one. Everything went fine without it". Sometimes I make myself feel old :P.
I sometimes think the world would be a better place without email and mobile phones, life would be a lot more relaxed. The only way to deal with them is to not use them as much as possible.
[+] [-] calinet6|14 years ago|reply
Should you spend 40 hours customizing your e-mail solution? Probably not.
Should you spend 1 hour and get it to an efficient state? Why the hell not. It'll save you some time later on.
This article is an overcorrection to a problem which stemmed from a lack of balance. The thing itself is not bad (engineering systems for your life), the imbalance of over-engineering was bad.
So yes, lifehacking to the extreme such that you spend more time working on systems than using those systems is probably a bad thing. But living your life as though no system could aid it is just as bad.
If you read GTD with the idea that David was a very eastern-religion influenced guy and studied martial arts and meditation, you sort of get this intuitively. There's a limit; a zen about it.
Don't over-engineer your life. Balance it using the tools available to you, so your tools just work and you don't have to think about the tools anymore. If you're spending too much time on the tools, you're doing it wrong.
[+] [-] JVIDEL|14 years ago|reply
You probably don't need much to do it, and the revenues from the sale will allow you to go around most of the obstacles that the vast majority of people have to go through in this life.
[+] [-] sparknlaunch12|14 years ago|reply
1. Less lifehacking, more life-designing
2. The best app/tool/gadget/hack for the job is the one you have with you.
3. The least possible (practical) amount of organization is best.
4. You are very important, but only to certain people. Make sure you identify them correctly.
If you only try implement one of these you got to moving in the right direction.
[+] [-] damian2000|14 years ago|reply
What an awesome quote ;-)
[+] [-] runjake|14 years ago|reply
In many ways, I think the key is not to sell your heart into something too quickly or even at all. Also, let other people be the early adopters -- examine their successes and failures.
Be ruthless about the tools you use and the methods you use. If they're too cumbersome, ditch them.
I often wonder if the frustration with this encumbrance is whether its because for a lot of things, digital tools aren't the best choice. Or at least some digital paradigms aren't, such as Omnifocus and Evernote vs. a rough paper analog such as Notational Velocity.
[+] [-] dharmach|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|14 years ago|reply
Corollary: Over half of the audience for self-help books need one to stop buying self help books.
So, lifehacking is just self help packaged in tweet-sized and blog-post sized attention span chunks?
[+] [-] jonmb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|14 years ago|reply
Constantly being systems only and not doing the work itself will make any system, no matter how optimized, ineffective.