Confessions of a recovering lifehacker

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"The perfect is the enemy of the good" - Voltaire

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.

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.

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.

As with most things, there's a balance to it.

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.

Wow! The life hacker recovery points were great.

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.

"Syncing all your crap with all your other crap"

What an awesome quote ;-)

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.

I'll try to make a law here: For every way you can use X to improve your life, there's 100 ways X will just waste your time or worse.

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?

Steve Pavlina wrote a related article titled Self Help Junkies: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/04/self-help-junkies/

Love this post -- breaks down the analysis paralysis that can settle in when confusing activity with results.

Constantly being systems only and not doing the work itself will make any system, no matter how optimized, ineffective.

Is lifehacking a trend? I remember in the good old days hacking was just hacking or social engineering. Now these 'hipster hackers' are giving it names like lifehacker, brogramming, etc. I'm getting old.

Here's the David Foster Wallace speech he recommends https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8 .

Yes, but presumably there exist people who are both getting things done and choosing the right things to do.

Also, I'd reconsider the fuchsia emphasis.

This really made my morning. I can finally stop re-reading GTD!

For the tl;dr -- Learn to discern the forest from the trees.

Thanks for sharing, it was a good read.

Finally the why and not the how

Balance is everything.

This article definitely makes some great insights, but it also rubs me wrong in several ways:

1. Mr. Pavlus asserts that all "life hacking" is a distraction. Yes, he says "9 out of 10" and "in a lot of cases," and he backpedals in the conclusion, but the tone of the article is really a total denouncement. I disagree with this. Like him, I think that it is very important to have life goals, priorities, and a focus on simplicity. However, I also think that once this is accomplished, it is easy to sift out the "hacks" and tools that A) further simplify your life rather than further complicate, and B) give a greater return of time and energy than what's required to implement, learn, and maintain them. I think that this article would have been better presented as an analysis of why we seek out these "life hacks" (If you're looking for them, at least you're not THAT far from the right mindset!), and a suggestion for improving the way we view and implement them.

It is certainly easy to get caught up in the excitement of improving your tools and organization, especially the electronic ones. Everything is just so smooth and colorful! But that doesn't mean it's always purely a distraction. It might be a waste of my time to spend an hour trying to tweak my GMail to work with some unholy union of Quicksilver and Applescript (It wasn't, I use that hotkey every day), but I don't think it's a waste to spend ten minutes learning GMail keyboard shortcuts I will use for a long time to come.

Here's how I resolve the gap. When I see something that I think will be useful for me, I stop right there and send it to my inbox to research later. Treating even the initial research as another task gives me time to let it simmer and unconsciously decide if I really need it, and more importantly, when it comes time to return to that research, I will be more impartial about evaluating that research against my other priorities. If I do decide to do it, I will be much more likely to focus on just that one new hack, and not go on a lifehacking spree.

By the way, my "inbox," and my entire GTD system, is just a set of tags and filters in my GMail. After having the idea, it took me about an hour to think through and implement, and it has improved my entire life. I consider it and GTD a great example of the good kind of lifehacking -- both A) and B) are satisfied.

2. This is a less important point - more of a technicality - but being someone who thinks everyone should at least know about GTD, I want to point out that a large part of the book is devoted to almost exactly this topic: Evaluating your life priorities at every level, and learning how to apply those to what you're doing at any given moment. It's the less sexy part of the system, but arguably the more important.

I've only read the book once myself, and I don't own it anymore. I gave it away to someone else, the proper fate of all good books. However, what I got from the book has stayed with me, and probably will for my whole life. I don't spend undue time and energy revisiting GTD and thinking about how much I can possibly optimize it, but I value it enormously, and my success with it prompts me to be at least somewhat open to new hacks if they seem equally valuable, and to advise others to do the same.

3. More of a case in point of the above: Mr. Pavlus' Game Genie example was apt, and he was right, it certainly didn't make the games any newer. But does that mean it was a waste of time? If changing the rules of the game slightly allows you to enjoy something you love in a fresh way, is that a distraction or is that life? Personally, I love video games, and I do something very similar. I do challenge runs and especially speedruns of games I love, old and new, so that I can continue to genuinely enjoy them well beyond the initial experience. That's what I think the best hacks are really about: Squeezing the most you can not out of your system, but out of life.

I've come to the conclusion that the hardest part of "lifehacking" is what I might call the Principle of Moderate Change.

Essentially, small changes can't be pushed by will alone, because they're easy to make but hard to maintain. They just don't make enough of a difference. If you try to get up 5 minutes earlier every morning, you're not going to become a "morning person". You're going to start making exceptions because there just isn't a real difference between waking up at 7:25 vs. 7:30. Likewise, people who try to "cut back" on cigarettes fail. After a month, they're back to their old rate. Small changes get wiped out if there isn't some long-term, glacial force (not conscious will) pushing them.

From a static perspective, you need enough magnitude in the change to escape the "drainage region" of whatever local optimum you're at, and move into another region. If we take the more featured dynamic perspective wherein those optima might be moving, we see that gradual life changes are happening all the time, but that will power alone is not causing them: the glacial shift in these local optima is what does this.

On the other hand, extreme changes are usually rejected, both by the individual (who never gains confidence in his ability to see the change through) and by people that one intends to influence. The only time people accept these kinds of changes is when there's a sense either of desperation or extreme opportunity, and those are rare circumstances.

So it seems that the most effective way to consciously manage one's life is to make meaningful changes of middling size-- not so small that they get rubbed out by the long-term glacial changes, but not so large that it's impossible to really believe that they will work. I think this is appropriate to self-management and leadership: getting the size of the change right.

The problem with lifehacking is that the appropriate moderate and large changes vary from one person to another, which means that a one-size-fits-all approach won't work. Getting up at 6:00 am will make some people a lot more productive, and others far less. The larger the change, the more individualized this question of appropriateness gets. So "lifehacking" usually focuses on relatively small changes but promises a larger impact. It's not surprising that most of these hacks fail to deliver and end up costing more energy (through constant change and the continual depletion inflicted by unnecessary self-control) than they add in productivity.

If some mundane thing is taking too much of your time, then by all means "hack" it so you can get on with your life. Otherwise you are engaging in our old friend premature optimization.

There are a lot of different kinds of wankery in the world. There's nothing wrong with indulging in wankery, but it's important to be honest that that's what you're doing. To relabel it "productivity enhancement" or "lifehacking" does not change what it is, and may mislead you into thinking you're actually accomplishing something when you're not.

Perhaps the art of finding clever improvements for finding clever improvements in life should be called "lifehacking-hacking"? Then some one will post an article about how to more efficiently post articles about how to more efficiently post articles about life tricks, which will be called "lifehacking-hacking-hacking."

If you're good at adapting to your environment you don't need to waste so much time trying to adapt your environment to you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-9w3dlcmyk

guys like this would be better off "hacking" their wrists.