7 ms·

Down with lifehacking

106 points by andreipop 13y ago

eksith 13y ago
How to "life hack": 1) Obtain organizer. 2) Use it. I think some of us like to experience the joy of inefficiency to some degree provided it doesn't hinder too much of productivity. "within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers" This breaks my heart so much. Sleeping, the thing I'm not able to do very well in the first place, is one of the most sacred activities I can engage in. The last thing I need is to make it shorter (albeit allegedly more efficient). Edit: Er... brain fart grammar. I need more Lifehacking!
- kiba 13y ago
  "within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers" This breaks my heart so much. Sleeping, the thing I'm not able to do very well in the first place, is one of the most sacred activities I can engage in. The last thing I need is to make it shorter (albeit allegedly more efficient). I thought the conventional wisdom on Hacker News is that you should sleep well, exercise, eat right, and have a good balance of activities, even if you are a startup founder.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    That should be the conventional wisdom everywhere. I would say, on average, programmers are worse at these things. Free food & booze and a job that makes it easy to work wherever, whenever certainly doesn't help.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    This isn't limited to HN, but I feel like the startup scene is somewhat of a "do as I say, not as I do" phenomenon. People will nod in enthusiastic agreement about the need to work sustainably, be balanced, eat well, sleep enough, etc. And then pull an all nighter filled with Monster and Red Bull. There's a bit of a dissonance in the community. On the one hand we agree with all of this talk about balance, on the other hand the culture is still very much an overgrown frathouse. We're touting the merits of working smarter while at the same time playing up the "code through the night!" hackathons. We'll find our way out of it eventually.
    - francoisdevlin 13y ago
      Take a moment to compare this with the age distribution of HN, and you'll start to put it all together.
jgrahamc 13y ago
"Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time—so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?" Sure, yes. But there's nothing new about this and it really doesn't have anything to do with lifehacking or Silicon Valley. Speaking from the lofty position of having letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s I can tell you that people have been enthusiastic about this kind of thing forever! And some people will be so enthusiastic that they'll totally overdo it and lose the benefit.
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  >letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s Please post a scan of that. Actually maybe don't, there's no way the reality of Time Management Magazine circa 1990 is going to live up to what my imagination is currently constructing.
  - MDCore 13y ago
    > letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s Did you know you can set a "wake up time" for your computer? This is set in your computer's BIOS (Basic Input Output System). Access it by pressing F2 or Del while the RAM counts down (hurry and press it, unless you have 8Mb of RAM!) This is how I get my computer to start the lengthy boot process before I've woken up, saving me hours of waiting every month.
    - jmadsen 13y ago
      Hmmm... I just push the button, then go get some coffee. Thereby saving myself the time it took you to do the F2 thingy. Which I then lost writing this post to tell you about it :-(
- Millennium 13y ago
  He does have a point, though. Lifehacking was supposed to be a means to an end: a way to get more time to oneself by finding more effective ways to deal with the daily chores and other "maintenance" tasks. But for far too many, it has become an end and itself: the time gained back from lifehacks gets reinvested into LIFEHACK MOAR, and we become slaves to routine in the very way we were trying to escape. That wasn't the point. What lifehacks are awesome for, though, is getting your life straightened out. If you're like a lot of geeks, you can probably identify one or two things that you've let fall by the wayside in the quest for more time that you really shouldn't have. But now, you're having more trouble Just Doing Them back into your life. Lifehacks present an alternate approach to these tasks: a way to do them that breaks the psychological associations that led you to stop doing them in the first place. That can be a very powerful thing. So next time you decide to tackle that task, try a lifehacked approach. It really helps.
orofino 13y ago
To me this article 1)says very little 2) conflates 'lifehacking' and 'lifestyle design' Lifehacking to me has always been about little things you do to reduce friction and mundanity in your day to day. Tim Ferris promotes something else entirely which advocates an entirely different lifestyle, fueled by passive income, allowing you to focus on What You Want™. [Sorry for the buzzword bingo above, I felt I needed to embrace it to adequately articulate the thoughts.]
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  Lifestyle design incorporates life hacking. You can't have lifestyle design without life hacking.
650REDHAIR 13y ago
Lifehacking --> Quantified self
- norswap 13y ago
  Care to expand? Do you think that quantifying your life actually has some benefits? I was never totally sold on that claim.
  - jaynos 13y ago
    To some extent, yes. You need to know where you spend your time (not down to the minute) in order to free up time. Knowing calorie consumption helps if you want to lose weight.
    - zecho 13y ago
      I agree with this, but data for data's sake is worthless, which is where many life hackers get lost in the weeds. Knowing your calorie count helps you understand where you may be overestimating your exercise and underestimating your intake, which is a common problem when people try to lose weight. As you gain more experience, the data itself becomes less and less useful. I'm not convinced that ever-more-granular access to data (such as precise micronutrients) makes people any healthier than those who don't pay attention to them. All things in moderation. Including moderation.
  - gngeal 13y ago
    Do you think that quantifying your life actually has some benefits? I was never totally sold on that claim. You've never had an ECG done?
    - norswap 13y ago
      Just because I eat does not mean I am bulimic, in the same way, having an ECG doe snot mean I "quantify my life". I meant quantifying a lot of things which are not usually done (tracking your time, measuring and weighing yourself everyday, calory counts, keeping track of productive output, etc).
tomasien 13y ago
"You should spend time doing nothing" is a life hack. Life hacks aren't all about doing more more efficiently, what do you think the title "The 4 Hour Work Week" denotes? MORE work? (On the record - not a fan of the 4HWW)
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  It's all about the subtitle '...and join the new rich.'
Dewie 13y ago
> Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time—so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it? Is there anything more self-defeating than investing money to get more money, only to reinvest the profits of the investment?
knowtheory 13y ago
For someone who has spent a great deal of time decrying how facile and shallow TED has become, Evgeny Morozov has really doubled down contrarianism for contrarianism's sake without contending with irony therein. He styles himself as a truth teller to some sort of "techno-elite", but he's really just a troll with nothing interesting to say.
- mcguire 13y ago
  Oh, I don't know. It's kind of entertaining to take one crazy person ("Consumed within three hours of getting under the sheets, meals of at least 800 milligrams of cholesterol ... and 40 grams of protein produced dramatically faster time-to-sleep scores....") and rub them up against another, contrasting, crazy person ("within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers").
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  I find his views quite interesting, and particularly agree with his skepticism about 'solutionism.'
danso 13y ago
Oh boy, another vapid commentary by Evgeny Morozov, following the tried and true formula of: 1. Pick topic close to the heart of techies 2. Deride the worst/most fanatical examples of said topic in practice 3. Make non-techies feel safe and smug that techie people are just mindless electric sheep Because the idea that there's a way to streamline your life's mundane tasks so that you can do something other than watch cat videos is just beyond imagination. Nope, people obsessed with efficency are automatons who would only use that free time to just work harder and/or view cat videos. This essay is even more nonsensical than his usual. It's like he ran out of wild anecdotes abo life hacking and had to find other words to which "hacking" has been appended.
- lvs 13y ago
  I think it's wrong to bifurcate the audience into technie and non-techie, as if the only people who don't buy into personal optimizer narcissism are decidedly untechnical. You live in a little bubble if you think that's the case.
  - danso 13y ago
    No doubt. Don't get me wrong, there's obviously excesses when it comes to life hacking, or entrepernurialism, or anything, and it's fine to pushback with reasoned arguments. However, IMO, Morozov's contrarianism leaves little room for a healthy spectrum, and devolves quickly into "look at those tech freaks!"
  - vixus 13y ago
    The majority of people I know who are into aggressively and efficiently managing their time are definitively 'non-techies'.
- zalew 13y ago
  > another vapid commentary by Evgeny Morozov HN - where skepticism is allowed and ecouraged only as long as it doesn't touch the sacred technocrat dogmas.
  - 13y ago
theorique 13y ago
How one-sided. Anything worthy can be done to excess, but that line is drawn by the individual. Take running as an example - the couch potato thinks the weekend 5K duffers are "running to excess"; the 5K duffers think the person training for a marathon is "running to excess"; the marathon trainers think the ultra-runners are "running to excess"; the ultra-runners think the 72-hour endurance runners are "running to excess". As long as a person's lifehacking "system" is contributing to their well being, and serving them, who's to say it's wrong? If someone steps back and says, "ok, I'm working this system too much and I want to change it", then that's fine too. Really, people - live and let live - it's not that hard.
- robbles 13y ago
  I agree, but I also think this argument goes both ways. The 5K runners think the couch potatoes should run more, the marathon trainers think the 5K runners should run more, etc. In a similar fashion, the "inefficient" are bombarded with lifehacking advice from the likes of Tim Ferriss and David Allen. I think if there's one good takeaway from this article, it's that the lifehackers should "live and let live" as well. Not everyone needs or wants to optimize their life.
  - theorique 13y ago
    I agree with that too. People don't need to evangelize their latest productivity system.
    - tankbot 13y ago
      I'm not sure. I'll agree that it can be irritating, but I think sometimes people actually do need to evangelize their latest $WHATEVER in order to help motivate themselves and stay focused. Whether or not this is a sign of un/healthy activity could also be an interesting debate.
      - theorique 13y ago
        Yes, generally it's more about the evangelizer rather than their target (see: vegan, Christian, vi-user, etc)
enraged_camel 13y ago
One thing I remember from watching the Inbox Zero presentation [1] by Merlin Mann a couple of years ago was the analogy he used involving a burger joint. Paraphrasing, he said that lifehacking is similar to optimizing the process of taking orders and organizing them, but at some point those orders actually need to be fulfilled. Otherwise you'll end up with a lot of angry customers, who don't care about what awesome optimizations you're doing behind the scenes! This is not to say that lifehacking is useless. Rather, the emphasis is that ultimately, you have to get things done. [1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk
jff 13y ago
I thought the time saved by lifehacks was usually devoted to writing blog posts about how you've been doing X for 3 days now and it's amazing.
- logn 13y ago
  No, it's so you can take the Google ad profits from your blog with that article to work less hours at work which you devote to creating an AI robot to write more lifehacking articles until the circle of life is complete and you have time to catch up on all that missed sleep.
jonmc12 13y ago
“Business destroys creativity, self-knowledge, emotional well-being, your ability to be social,” - does not seem to reconcile the partition of mental activity presented in "The Role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" (summary: http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the-role-of-deliberate-practice-in-the http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the...) - notably, "The importance of rest" has its own section. Productivity tools are not destructive, they are just useful in context and inefficient when mis-applied - just like any other tool.
- andrewthesmart 13y ago
  What I say in the book is "chronic busyness destroys creativity, self-knowledge, emotional well-being, your ability to be social" and that I would argue is true. Deliberate practice to me means intense focus on one specific activity for a long period, not trying to juggle long to do lists or multitasking. Crucially, deliberate practice also I would argue an internally imposed task - in that the practitioner chooses to focus on it - rather than switching among hundreds of tasks a day on an externally imposed schedule. What I argue against in the book is trying to master "busyness" - because quite simply our brains are not designed to be busy and when they are busy the amazing things our brains can do are suppressed. That's my hypothesis - I think it's testable.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    I look forward to reading it - I was also greatly amused by your text adventure ;-)
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
Lifehacking is when someone thinks of the idea to use a paper binder to keep your cords tidy. I hereby propose a vote on calling what TFA is talking about as either: A) Todo Voodoo B) Efficiency Masturbation Feel free to use either free of charge. I just open sourced them and now intend to have Tim Ferriss write a book about how you can do all this in only four hours a week!

106 points by andreipop 13y ago

How to "life hack": 1) Obtain organizer. 2) Use it. I think some of us like to experience the joy of inefficiency to some degree provided it doesn't hinder too much of productivity. "within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers" This breaks my heart so much. Sleeping, the thing I'm not able to do very well in the first place, is one of the most sacred activities I can engage in. The last thing I need is to make it shorter (albeit allegedly more efficient). Edit: Er... brain fart grammar. I need more Lifehacking!

kiba 13y ago
"within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers" This breaks my heart so much. Sleeping, the thing I'm not able to do very well in the first place, is one of the most sacred activities I can engage in. The last thing I need is to make it shorter (albeit allegedly more efficient). I thought the conventional wisdom on Hacker News is that you should sleep well, exercise, eat right, and have a good balance of activities, even if you are a startup founder.
- jmduke 13y ago
  That should be the conventional wisdom everywhere. I would say, on average, programmers are worse at these things. Free food & booze and a job that makes it easy to work wherever, whenever certainly doesn't help.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  This isn't limited to HN, but I feel like the startup scene is somewhat of a "do as I say, not as I do" phenomenon. People will nod in enthusiastic agreement about the need to work sustainably, be balanced, eat well, sleep enough, etc. And then pull an all nighter filled with Monster and Red Bull. There's a bit of a dissonance in the community. On the one hand we agree with all of this talk about balance, on the other hand the culture is still very much an overgrown frathouse. We're touting the merits of working smarter while at the same time playing up the "code through the night!" hackathons. We'll find our way out of it eventually.
  - francoisdevlin 13y ago
    Take a moment to compare this with the age distribution of HN, and you'll start to put it all together.

jgrahamc 13y ago

"Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time—so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?" Sure, yes. But there's nothing new about this and it really doesn't have anything to do with lifehacking or Silicon Valley. Speaking from the lofty position of having letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s I can tell you that people have been enthusiastic about this kind of thing forever! And some people will be so enthusiastic that they'll totally overdo it and lose the benefit.

JonnieCache 13y ago
>letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s Please post a scan of that. Actually maybe don't, there's no way the reality of Time Management Magazine circa 1990 is going to live up to what my imagination is currently constructing.
- MDCore 13y ago
  > letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s Did you know you can set a "wake up time" for your computer? This is set in your computer's BIOS (Basic Input Output System). Access it by pressing F2 or Del while the RAM counts down (hurry and press it, unless you have 8Mb of RAM!) This is how I get my computer to start the lengthy boot process before I've woken up, saving me hours of waiting every month.
  - jmadsen 13y ago
    Hmmm... I just push the button, then go get some coffee. Thereby saving myself the time it took you to do the F2 thingy. Which I then lost writing this post to tell you about it :-(
Millennium 13y ago
He does have a point, though. Lifehacking was supposed to be a means to an end: a way to get more time to oneself by finding more effective ways to deal with the daily chores and other "maintenance" tasks. But for far too many, it has become an end and itself: the time gained back from lifehacks gets reinvested into LIFEHACK MOAR, and we become slaves to routine in the very way we were trying to escape. That wasn't the point. What lifehacks are awesome for, though, is getting your life straightened out. If you're like a lot of geeks, you can probably identify one or two things that you've let fall by the wayside in the quest for more time that you really shouldn't have. But now, you're having more trouble Just Doing Them back into your life. Lifehacks present an alternate approach to these tasks: a way to do them that breaks the psychological associations that led you to stop doing them in the first place. That can be a very powerful thing. So next time you decide to tackle that task, try a lifehacked approach. It really helps.

orofino 13y ago

To me this article 1)says very little 2) conflates 'lifehacking' and 'lifestyle design' Lifehacking to me has always been about little things you do to reduce friction and mundanity in your day to day. Tim Ferris promotes something else entirely which advocates an entirely different lifestyle, fueled by passive income, allowing you to focus on What You Want™. [Sorry for the buzzword bingo above, I felt I needed to embrace it to adequately articulate the thoughts.]

k-mcgrady 13y ago
Lifestyle design incorporates life hacking. You can't have lifestyle design without life hacking.

650REDHAIR 13y ago

Lifehacking --> Quantified self

norswap 13y ago
Care to expand? Do you think that quantifying your life actually has some benefits? I was never totally sold on that claim.
- jaynos 13y ago
  To some extent, yes. You need to know where you spend your time (not down to the minute) in order to free up time. Knowing calorie consumption helps if you want to lose weight.
  - zecho 13y ago
    I agree with this, but data for data's sake is worthless, which is where many life hackers get lost in the weeds. Knowing your calorie count helps you understand where you may be overestimating your exercise and underestimating your intake, which is a common problem when people try to lose weight. As you gain more experience, the data itself becomes less and less useful. I'm not convinced that ever-more-granular access to data (such as precise micronutrients) makes people any healthier than those who don't pay attention to them. All things in moderation. Including moderation.
- gngeal 13y ago
  Do you think that quantifying your life actually has some benefits? I was never totally sold on that claim. You've never had an ECG done?
  - norswap 13y ago
    Just because I eat does not mean I am bulimic, in the same way, having an ECG doe snot mean I "quantify my life". I meant quantifying a lot of things which are not usually done (tracking your time, measuring and weighing yourself everyday, calory counts, keeping track of productive output, etc).

tomasien 13y ago

"You should spend time doing nothing" is a life hack. Life hacks aren't all about doing more more efficiently, what do you think the title "The 4 Hour Work Week" denotes? MORE work? (On the record - not a fan of the 4HWW)

anigbrowl 13y ago
It's all about the subtitle '...and join the new rich.'

Dewie 13y ago

> Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time—so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it? Is there anything more self-defeating than investing money to get more money, only to reinvest the profits of the investment?

knowtheory 13y ago

For someone who has spent a great deal of time decrying how facile and shallow TED has become, Evgeny Morozov has really doubled down contrarianism for contrarianism's sake without contending with irony therein. He styles himself as a truth teller to some sort of "techno-elite", but he's really just a troll with nothing interesting to say.

mcguire 13y ago
Oh, I don't know. It's kind of entertaining to take one crazy person ("Consumed within three hours of getting under the sheets, meals of at least 800 milligrams of cholesterol ... and 40 grams of protein produced dramatically faster time-to-sleep scores....") and rub them up against another, contrasting, crazy person ("within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers").
anigbrowl 13y ago
I find his views quite interesting, and particularly agree with his skepticism about 'solutionism.'

danso 13y ago

Oh boy, another vapid commentary by Evgeny Morozov, following the tried and true formula of: 1. Pick topic close to the heart of techies 2. Deride the worst/most fanatical examples of said topic in practice 3. Make non-techies feel safe and smug that techie people are just mindless electric sheep Because the idea that there's a way to streamline your life's mundane tasks so that you can do something other than watch cat videos is just beyond imagination. Nope, people obsessed with efficency are automatons who would only use that free time to just work harder and/or view cat videos. This essay is even more nonsensical than his usual. It's like he ran out of wild anecdotes abo life hacking and had to find other words to which "hacking" has been appended.

lvs 13y ago
I think it's wrong to bifurcate the audience into technie and non-techie, as if the only people who don't buy into personal optimizer narcissism are decidedly untechnical. You live in a little bubble if you think that's the case.
- danso 13y ago
  No doubt. Don't get me wrong, there's obviously excesses when it comes to life hacking, or entrepernurialism, or anything, and it's fine to pushback with reasoned arguments. However, IMO, Morozov's contrarianism leaves little room for a healthy spectrum, and devolves quickly into "look at those tech freaks!"
- vixus 13y ago
  The majority of people I know who are into aggressively and efficiently managing their time are definitively 'non-techies'.
zalew 13y ago
> another vapid commentary by Evgeny Morozov HN - where skepticism is allowed and ecouraged only as long as it doesn't touch the sacred technocrat dogmas.
- 13y ago

theorique 13y ago

How one-sided. Anything worthy can be done to excess, but that line is drawn by the individual. Take running as an example - the couch potato thinks the weekend 5K duffers are "running to excess"; the 5K duffers think the person training for a marathon is "running to excess"; the marathon trainers think the ultra-runners are "running to excess"; the ultra-runners think the 72-hour endurance runners are "running to excess". As long as a person's lifehacking "system" is contributing to their well being, and serving them, who's to say it's wrong? If someone steps back and says, "ok, I'm working this system too much and I want to change it", then that's fine too. Really, people - live and let live - it's not that hard.

robbles 13y ago
I agree, but I also think this argument goes both ways. The 5K runners think the couch potatoes should run more, the marathon trainers think the 5K runners should run more, etc. In a similar fashion, the "inefficient" are bombarded with lifehacking advice from the likes of Tim Ferriss and David Allen. I think if there's one good takeaway from this article, it's that the lifehackers should "live and let live" as well. Not everyone needs or wants to optimize their life.
- theorique 13y ago
  I agree with that too. People don't need to evangelize their latest productivity system.
  - tankbot 13y ago
    I'm not sure. I'll agree that it can be irritating, but I think sometimes people actually do need to evangelize their latest $WHATEVER in order to help motivate themselves and stay focused. Whether or not this is a sign of un/healthy activity could also be an interesting debate.
    - theorique 13y ago
      Yes, generally it's more about the evangelizer rather than their target (see: vegan, Christian, vi-user, etc)

enraged_camel 13y ago

One thing I remember from watching the Inbox Zero presentation [1] by Merlin Mann a couple of years ago was the analogy he used involving a burger joint. Paraphrasing, he said that lifehacking is similar to optimizing the process of taking orders and organizing them, but at some point those orders actually need to be fulfilled. Otherwise you'll end up with a lot of angry customers, who don't care about what awesome optimizations you're doing behind the scenes! This is not to say that lifehacking is useless. Rather, the emphasis is that ultimately, you have to get things done. [1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk

jff 13y ago

I thought the time saved by lifehacks was usually devoted to writing blog posts about how you've been doing X for 3 days now and it's amazing.

logn 13y ago
No, it's so you can take the Google ad profits from your blog with that article to work less hours at work which you devote to creating an AI robot to write more lifehacking articles until the circle of life is complete and you have time to catch up on all that missed sleep.

jonmc12 13y ago

“Business destroys creativity, self-knowledge, emotional well-being, your ability to be social,” - does not seem to reconcile the partition of mental activity presented in "The Role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" (summary: http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the-role-of-deliberate-practice-in-the http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the...) - notably, "The importance of rest" has its own section. Productivity tools are not destructive, they are just useful in context and inefficient when mis-applied - just like any other tool.

andrewthesmart 13y ago
What I say in the book is "chronic busyness destroys creativity, self-knowledge, emotional well-being, your ability to be social" and that I would argue is true. Deliberate practice to me means intense focus on one specific activity for a long period, not trying to juggle long to do lists or multitasking. Crucially, deliberate practice also I would argue an internally imposed task - in that the practitioner chooses to focus on it - rather than switching among hundreds of tasks a day on an externally imposed schedule. What I argue against in the book is trying to master "busyness" - because quite simply our brains are not designed to be busy and when they are busy the amazing things our brains can do are suppressed. That's my hypothesis - I think it's testable.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  I look forward to reading it - I was also greatly amused by your text adventure ;-)

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

Lifehacking is when someone thinks of the idea to use a paper binder to keep your cords tidy. I hereby propose a vote on calling what TFA is talking about as either: A) Todo Voodoo B) Efficiency Masturbation Feel free to use either free of charge. I just open sourced them and now intend to have Tim Ferriss write a book about how you can do all this in only four hours a week!