This is where life hacking comes in. It was on a February morning in 2004 that Danny O’Brian stepped to the podium at the Emerging Technology Conference, unknowing of the waves his words would start once their echo was heard across the Web. During his segment, “Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks,” he laid out a few simple tricks on how to keep organized amid the technology onslaught, and thus coined the term “life hacking.”
Inspired by his speech, hubs began sprouting up across the Internet on how to wield technology while not being blinded by its glowing allure. Among them was Lifehacker, which would move on to become one of the most visited websites on the Internet.
Yet an ironic thing happened. As the concept of life hacking began to grow and spread, an obsession grew amid the crowds that transformed it into the very thing it set out to destroy—a distraction from what needs to be done and an insatiable craving for tricks to enhance productivity.
“Eventually you’re just reading about productivity and how to be productive, instead of actually doing anything productive,” Joey Daoud, director and producer of life hacking documentary “You 2.0,” said in a phone interview.
“People are trying to find the Holy Grail, hoping that one trick is going to solve all their problems … but at the end of the day, life hacking is just hard work and determination to organize your stuff and get everything done—at the end of the day it’s just determination,” Daoud said.
Keep It Simple
When O’Brien coined the concept of life hacking, the idea was more about using less technology and thus reducing distractions. During his talk, he relayed the tricks of the “Alpha Geeks”— people who know computers like a second language, and who have developed some of the best tricks of the trade in making technology work for them.
The basic idea was that leaders in the field take the simple road. Their to-do lists were done on simple text documents run on the most basic text editors available, rather than with snazzy, specialized software. Alpha Geeks, he noted, prefer using just one app, and would moan and groan if their employers tried forcing them to use high-tech organizers.
There were just a few other points: use scripts to automate any repetitive tasks, be sure to sync different devices so you always have your files (and backups) when needed, and don’t let things stagnate—try to get things done as they come along.
Now, the sad fate of life hacking is that hubs of tricks are transforming into mere attention vacuums and endless data streams. The old ways of yore have sunk into a need to keep readers coming back—hooking them and reeling them into an addiction that craves more software, more scripts, and more tricks.
According to Daoud, even many leaders of the field aren’t very well organized themselves, often living in heaps of work and apartments filled with scattered papers—something that came as a shock while he did interviews for his film.
Daoud says he understood this as a reflection that people who are leaders in life hacking “have a personal reason that turned them onto this, like they had a problem and they found a solution,” he said.
Despite this, the developing problem with life hacking is well known among the experts. “Some were aware, and critical, when I brought up the point that a lot of people just keep reading the websites hoping to find one trick that will kind of fix everything,”
“They definitely were aware of people who get hooked on this productivity media, trying to find the one-fix solution that’s not really out there,” he said.
True Life Hacking
One of the few exceptions Daoud found to life hackers with messy lives was David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, which is one of the leading books on keeping organized in the digital age. According to Daoud, “He totally practices what he preaches. He has his whole office set up with all these systems he talks about in his book.”
Allen holds true to the original life hacker ethos—he found several tricks and methods that work, uses them, and doesn’t continue searching for more tricks.
The book relays several tricks and methods people can use to lessen the weight of information overload, yet states clearly in the introduction “there is no single, once-and-for-all solution.”
The problem, Allen writes, is “There has been a missing piece in our new culture of knowledge work: a system with a coherent set of behaviors and tools that functions effectively at the level at which work really happens.”
He adds that this mythical solve-all tool would need to “save a lot more time and effort than are needed to maintain it. It must make it easier to get things done.”
Daoud believes this is one of the key areas where life hacking has gone wrong: we spend more time on the tools than we do on the actual work. He agrees that some of the tricks are useful, “but I feel it’s like get in, read some of the solutions, then get out.”
With life hacking, and all technology, there has to be a point where we learn to stop.
Even if the devices are clean and to the point, we are becoming saturated with distractions. Twitter gives an endless stream of information and links, Facebook shows what our friends are up to, text messaging and calls have made us reachable at every moment, and the rest of that hard-earned time is often spent on email.
Today’s devices include many of these tools as additional features and then adds to the distractions. “Like with the iPad, I’ve been reading a lot of books on my iPad, but now it’s like my book tells me when I have a new email, and my book can notify me of stuff,” Daoud said.
The solution may come down to going backwards a few days a week where you turn everything off, or set aside two hours a day when you turn off all your electronics and work on what needs to get done.
Life hacking is about eliminating distractions, and in its truest form, according to Daoud, life hacking is about knowing when to stop searching, turn everything off, and start getting things done.
