Rube Goldberg - public domain
Want to impress your vegan friends? Here’s how you can carry over 300 vegan recipes on your iPod.
Want to save money on long distance phone calls? Use this new service called Skype.
This simple AppleScript makes a giant poster from a lot of small photos.
These are some of the first time-saving tips offered on Lifehacker when it debuted in January 2005. Gina Trapani, the site’s originator and first editor became an evangelist for the “better living through technology” that infused the early days of the Internet.
That’s what Lifehacker’s about: the endless possibilities of technology and how it can improve our lives. Lifehacker points out software, sites, tips and tricks that help you get things done, plain and simple.
Where Life Hacks Come From
Trapani got the inspiration for the whole idea of “life hacking” from Danny O’Brien who gave a talk about the tech secrets that top programmers were using to improve their digital lives.
for most people, geeks or not, modern life is just this incredibly complex problem amenable to no good obvious solution. But we can peck around the edges of it; we can make little shortcuts. And once you point out that everyone does that, once you coin the term, it's really easy to pile a whole of lot of shared behaviours into one neat pile.
The first life hacks were extremely geeky, often using bits of code. But you can trace their lineage back to an earlier form of life hacking - the syndicated household tips columns in newspapers and magazines.
Hints from Heloise is one of the best-known of the old-school life hackers with such tips as How to remove holiday stains To remove red-wine stains -pour a big dose of salt on top of the stain to absorb the liquid. Put the tablecloth into cold water and try to rub out the stain. Use an enzyme detergent in the hottest water safe for the fabric, soak for 30 minutes and launder.
These household tips and warnings go back to the 19th century with columns and articles that aimed at helping housewives modernize by applying “science” to homemaking.
Revitalize a feather bed by leaving it in the rain to wash and in the sun to dry,
Clean grimy wallpaper with ammonia and stale bread,
Spruce up varnished paint by scrubbing with a brew made from old tea leaves.
The Lie Behind All Life Hacks
René Descartes - the original life hacker
Our obsession with hints, tips and trade secrets that edge us to higher productivity…and by extension greater degrees of happiness(?)…can be traced back to industrialization. In order to keep production lines moving managers needed to find ways to eliminate waste and maximize productivity.
Frederick Taylor is the great grandfather of the life hackers, measuring the movements of factory workers with a stopwatch in order to cut out wasted motions of factory workers. In one case he discovered that workers walked a combined 15 miles per day to get drinks at the water cooler. Solution? Set up additional water coolers closer to workstations. The cost of the coolers would be offset by the increase in productivity.
All life hacks follow a simple formula - (1) something in the environment is out of whack, (2) this condition annoys you, (3) here is the lever you can pull to put things back in whack. Boom! Everything is awesome!
Life hacks assume a mechanistic view of the world. Every annoyance can be fixed by applying a simple algorithm. Happiness can be maximized by reducing life’s annoyances.
We can trace this mechanistic view of the world back to René Descartes and the deal he made with the devil by separating mind from matter. The whole is merely the sum of its parts.
But what if the Cartesian model is wrong? What if it’s a bad assumption that net happiness increases when we detangle our cables using paperclips?
Welcome to Peak Life Hack
Photo by Vaikoovery | Wikimedia Commons
Laura Miller, writing for Slate, thinks that life hacking has had a good run but it’s reached the end of the line. She cites historian Joseph Reagle as one of a growing number of thought leaders turning their backs on life hacking.
I’ve lost faith in the concept of life hacking itself, the idea that my days could reach an apotheosis of efficiency and effectiveness and finally feel under control.
When Merlin Mann preaches *against* Inbox Zero - questioning the whole premise of the productivity lifestyle - you know it’s time to rethink the whole thing.
The problem is that the Cartesian, mechanistic, life hack-y view of the world does not account for the influence of the whole on each of the parts.
Take this life hack - use a spam filter to reduce unwanted email. Problem solved right? No - because your action wasn’t taken in isolation. Setting up a spam filter on your computer merely signaled mass marketers that they need to change their tactics.
Chances are that your email inbox is still full of spam, only now it’s mail that you volunteered to receive. Every time you try to life-hack your way to Inbox Zero you simply make the spammers develop smarter dark patterns for delivering spam.
And Here It Is - the Life Hack to End All Life Hacks
Image via Disruptive Design
This isn’t to say that life hacking is bad or that life hacks aren’t helpful. Adding bleach to baking soda is a hella great way to clean grout.
What it means is that obsessing over a productivity lifestyle isn’t likely to give you satisfying results in the long run.
What can you do about this? Consider focusing on the “life” part of the life hack. Don’t view productivity as a narrow set of activities that exist independently of the whole of your life. You might even want to map out the systems that affect your next productivity hack.
This isn’t a simple, one-size-fits-all, guaranteed fix to all or any of your productivity problems. It’s going to be a little messy, disorganized and stumbling. Instead of looking at life as a series of independent problems to be solved you need to start thinking of it as a whole system, where each change you make will change other parts of the system.
How to start you ask? (if you’ve read this far)
Beck Tench, a designer, educator and Ph.D. student, decided she wanted her to-do list to give her the same joy of possibility that she experiences when she looks into her pantry. Check out this webcast to see how she adds life to her Omnifocus database.
Maybe you’ll get inspired to brainstorm some other ways to view your task as a living thing.