Life Hacks Improve Productivity
Lifehacker Tips To Increase Efficiency in the Digital Age
Jun 6, 2009
"Lifehacking" is a term created by technology writer Danny O'Brien, who realized that his most productive colleagues had developed personal mini computer programs in order to improve productivity. Upon interviewing them, he noticed commonalities: many people were individually solving problems held by the entire group. O'Brien posited that the entire online community should share and improve upon these individual solutions.
Lifehacking has since evolved into a massive grass-roots movement of hundreds of websites focused on the development of any straightforward technique to improve efficiency, online or off.
Lifehackers Create Productivity Solutions in the Age of Distraction
In the May 25, 2009, New York Magazine article "In Defense of Distraction" Sam Anderson notes that "we keep an average of eight windows open on our computer screens at one time and skip between them every twenty seconds."
People are becoming wired to procrastinate, not by contemplating their navels, but by checking email every 2 minutes; reading news as soon as the feed updates; watching random videos on YouTube; IMing everyone who pops up on screen; Twittering; Facebooking...you get the idea, and you're probably doing it right now.
Life hacks are designed to keep you on task or to speed through mundane daily chores. For each concept, there are typically a number of websites, programs and applications designed to assist you in implementing the life hack. Here's an overview of three popular life hacks you can use to improve productivity today.
Mindmaps Organize Ideas With Both Sides of the Brain
You have a big idea but find it difficult to organize the myriad thoughts swirling around your head. Mind mapping allows you to capture all of those ideas and expound upon them in an organic, visually based way. Joel Falconer of LifeHack.org calls a mindmap "a place where visual representations and written representations of things merge to create something that is more natural to the mind" than typical word-based methods of notation.
Mind mapping software abounds. Do a Google search for "mind maps" or "mindmapping software", or visit LifeHack.org for a list of 11 free mindmapping applications.
Inbox Zero: Email Efficiency
"Inbox Zero" is Merlin Mann's popular methodology for improving email efficiency and never allowing your email to pile up. Techniques include:
- Moving your currently busting-at-the-seams inbox to a "fresh start" folder
- Touching an email only one time
- Ruthlessly unsubscribing from emails you don't need to see (such as Facebook notifications)
- Committing to ending each day with every email read
- Setting up templates for frequently used responses.
For detailed "Inbox Zero" hacks visit Mann's site devoted to this, email methodology.
(10+2)*5: Keeping Procrastinators On Task
If you have difficulty accomplishing a task without toggling between browser windows or becoming otherwise distracted, Merlin Mann's simplistic but effective technique may be your holy grail of microdiscipline. "Ten-plus-two-times-five" works in one-hour chunks of time broken down into 10 and 2 minute increments.
- Work for 10 minutes with a "single-minded focus on moving toward completion on a single task."
- Take a 2-minute break to do anything you want, from grabbing a snack to catching up on the NBA Finals, to Facebooking ... anything at all. Then, back on task for the next 10-minute increment.
- Repeat this cycle 5 times, for a total of one hour.
According to Mann on 43folders.com, "The trick is to snap your mind out of the inert state that's allowing procrastination to take over. You're breaking down whatever resistance has made you not do what your brain knows needs to be done." Eventually, you will train your brain to stay on-task, and those 2-minute breaks will become a thing of the past.
Fifteen years ago, it would be unthinkable to develop a technique for staying on task for just ten minutes, or for the average person to handle a daily inundation of email. In the new age of distraction, however, life hacks may be the key to improving productivity.
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