Life Hacking

Submitted by David Snopek on February 13, 2008 - 7:07pm

Yes, you guessed it! I'm interested in life hacking. Just thought I'd let you know in case the name of this blog wasn't a dead give away (ed: this domain was originally intended for a life hacking app). I'm a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done, which was also the inspiration of the great life hacker website 43folders.com.

Anyway, I recently added some life hacker blogs to my RSS reader and just read this post. It doesn't have much that I haven't heard before, but its always good to periodically review these types of tips to remind yourself, and think, "Oh, yeah, I should really get around to trying that!"

A few things on this list that jumped out at me:

Brainstorming: The act of generating dozens of ideas without editing or censoring yourself. Lots of people use mindmaps for this: stick the thing you want to think about in the middle (a problem you need to solve, a theme you want to write about, etc.) and start writing whatever you think of. Build off of each of the sub-topics, and each of their sub-topics. Don’t worry about whether the ideas are any good or not — you don’t have to follow through on them, just get them out of your head. After a while, you’ll start surprising yourself with some really creative concepts.

I censure the hell of out my brainstorming. This is a habit I really, really need to get rid of. I'll discard good ideas up front because of some messy detail. It would be better to consider everything upfront. Then I can look at all the options and say, "Well, this one isn't perfect because it had this problem, but thats not so bad, we can probably solve it."

10+2*5: Work in short spurts of 10 minutes, interrupted by 2 minute breaks. Use a timer. Do this 5 times an hour to stay on target without over-taxing your physical and mental resources. Spend those 2 minutes getting a drink, going to the bathroom, or staring out a window.

Dude! This is an awesome idea and one that I've never heard of before. As soon as I can track down a good timer, I'll give this one a shot and report back.