A Startup's Guide to Time Hacking

For hard problems, you can take advantage of (and should embrace) the mind's wild variability by consciously outlining what you know about the problem until you hit a pause in the stream of consciousness, letting your subconscious work it over for a while as you put your conscious mind into a different context, and returning to it every so often to see if you've realized anything new. For me this is sometimes highly productive. And it's not always something glaringly apparent that will be presented to you. Often something up the hierarchy has changed but your conscious representation is left with a bunch of dangling pointers. So it's good to revisit the roots of the problem and reconstruct the problem from there outwards.

A good way to get better at it is to deliberately engage in this active context switching. You will pick up on what sorts of frequencies and how far away from the original problem you should context switch as you get more experience with doing this as deliberately as possible.

Time and again, a term associated with a good and rare quality gets picked up by the business world, and then the marketing machine, in the process of using that term to sell everything and the kitchen sink, turns it into something annoying and worthless.

Why not hack breakfast altogether? Let's do lunch.

It's in the same boat as "growth hackers", which is what people in technology call themselves when they're afraid to admit that they do marketing.

Yep, it's almost as annoying as using "Apple adjectives" (flowery prose like wonderful, pleasure, beauty, love, etc... applied towards any tech).

Hacker hasn't really meant anything for decades. I remember the old guys getting mad when "hacker" became a boogieman for the news, but the recent round seemed to start when some dude wrote a book that used the cachet of "hacking" to sell impressionable youths on the idea of working for him in a tech-adjacent position. By appealing to someone's desires and by giving your thing a unique je ne sais quoi (no matter how flimsy it really is) you can influence them into your personal brand of chasing their desires.

The article is good, but the website should be using more readable fonts and background color. Just use the fonts and color used by Hacker News.

Didn't show up as tiny for me, but it's an absolutely horrible font for long texts: a) Missing serifs - which by itself is not critical, but makes it significantly worse when combined with b) Paper-thin weight, which is hard to read, and worsens on computer displays because antialiasing (regardless of subpixel or not) artifacts become much more visible and hence have more impact.

"Designer" most likely worked on his shiny Retina Macbook and forgot to take lower ppi displays into account. Which (unfortunately) are still the majority, and will continue to for quite some time.

I normally find these comments quite picky but that font is actually painful to read it's so thin.

I started reading on mobile but reached for desktop and converted to pdf using http://www.printfriendly.com/ (they have a nice bookmarklet).

I have a tool for moments like this. It takes the central article on a page and displays only it in a nicely formatted in-window pop-up. I use Firefox Reader, though Evernote's Clearly and Readability would both suffice. Pocket would work too.