https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota
'"Lifehacking" is in pretty bad odor these days, and with good reason: a
once-useful catch-all for describing how to make things easier has become a pit
of productivity porn, grifter hustling, and anodyne advice wreathed in
superlatives and transformed into SEO-compliant listicles.
But I was there when lifehacking was born, and I'm here to tell you, it wasn't
always thus. Lifehacking attained liftoff exactly 19 years and 348 days ago, on
Feb 11, 2004, when Danny O'Brien presented "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of
Overprolific Alpha Geeks" at the 0'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (aka
ETCON). I was there, and I took notes:
https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt
O'Brien's inspiration was his social circle, in which people he knew to be no
smarter or better or motivated than anyone else in that group were somehow able
to do much more than their peers, in some specific domain. O'Brien delved
deeply into these peoples' lives and discovered that each of them had merely
("merely!") gotten very good at using one or two tools to automate things that
would otherwise take up a lot of their time.
These "hacks" freed up their practitioners to focus on things that mattered
more to them. They accomplished the goal set out in David Allen's
Getting
Things Done: to make a conscious choice about which things you are going to
fail to do today, rather than defaulting to doing the things that are easy and
trivial, at the expense of the things that matter, but are more complicated:
https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/
One trait all those lifehacks shared: everyone who created a little hack was
faintly embarrassed by it, and assumed that others who learned about their
tricks would find them trivial or foolish. O'Brien changed the world by showing
that other people were, in fact,
delighted and excited to learn about their
peers' cool little tricks.
(Unfortunately, this eventually opened the floodgates of overheated posts about
some miraculous hack that turned out to indeed be silly and trivial or even
actively bad, but that wasn't O'Brien's fault!)
I'm one of those people whom others perceive as very "productive." There are
some objective metrics on which this is true: I wrote nine books during
lockdown, for example. Like the lifehackers O'Brien documented in 2004, I have
lots of little hacks that aren't merely a way of getting more done – they're a
way to make sure that I get the stuff that matters to me (taking care of my
family and my health, and writing books) done.
A lot of these lifehacks boil down to making your life easier. There's a spot
on our kitchen counter where I put e-waste. Whenever I go out to the car, I
carry any e-waste out and put it in a bag in the trunk. Any time I'm near our
city dump, I stop and throw the bag into their e-waste bin. This is now a
habit, and habits are things you get for free: I spend zero time thinking about
e-waste, which means I have more time to think about things that matter (and
our e-waste still ends up in the right place).'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
