![lifehacker stayfocused lifehacker stayfocused](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ee/d2/b5/eed2b53bb0959052827d98876be323b5.jpg)
You could do it slightly differently (or faster, or “better”) from time to time and that would make it all feel new again and you could feel kind of engaged again, even though it wasn’t, really, and you weren’t, really.Įssentially, this kind of “hacking” is all about trying to make the best of something that is Kind of like how the Game Genie let you “hack” your boring old Nintendo cartridges back in the day so you wouldn’t have to beat Worlds 1-1 through 8-3 all over again, every day, in exactly the same way every time you played. maybe, if you’re lucky, make it all stink a little less.give yourself some feeling of agency over its inescapable presence in your life, and.The “-hacking” part is there to assert that since you’re going to spend a lot of your life putting up with this un-opt-outable bullshit anyway, you may as well fiddle around with said bullshit so that you can The “life-” part comes from the assumption that in our modern world, all this bullshit is a given - that you have to put up with it in large quantities. Remembering things that you tend to forget because they’re boring/tedious/annoying in the first place.Syncing all your crap with all your other crap.It’s about constantly fiddling around with all the bullshit that too often gets in the way of your life:
![lifehacker stayfocused lifehacker stayfocused](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--wziTCN95--/c_fit,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/uc61xb5cibbq8iei1jaa.png)
That’s because most of the stuff that pours out of these sites isn’t really about hacking your life. But it’s also a misnomer in 9 out of 10 cases.
![lifehacker stayfocused lifehacker stayfocused](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fa/9b/24/fa9b24c62ad2a0d3ad16a74bac62e25b.jpg)
They call it “ lifehacking” and it’s a damn catchy term. And maybe you’ll get something out of it, like I did from Merlin’s. But I’m writing my version because it’s, well, mine - and because it’s finally starting to sink in, in an actual, real-world, “changing the way I live” kind of way. In fact, the Head-Shaolin-Monk-For-Life of Lifehacking, Merlin Mann, said it first and probably best. It’s like running on a treadmill: you might get in really good shape, I guess, but you never actually go anywhere. There was always a better way to do almost anything.īut sometime over the last couple years (around the time I turned 30, not coincidentally), it has begun to dawn on me: Maybe all the time I spend looking for better ways to do things is keeping me from, well, doing things. I guess it’s genetic.) I loved my first Palm Pilot, I read “Getting Things Done” over a Christmas break for fun, and I took a dickish kind of pride in replacing whatever corporate email solution a job might foist upon me with my own selfishly optimized system (damn the consequences for company security). (I’m the son of two librarians, one of whom also worked as an unofficial programmer/sysadmin. I have a perverse love of systems and efficiency: analyzing, configuring, optmizing, categorizing, defining, and parameter-setting. I used to be a lifehacking addict, and in some ways I still am.