Lifehacker: 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day
A life hack reprograms your personal workflow to save you time and effort.
Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker book centers around this philosophy. Life is too precious to waste time doing some monotonous computing task. You must find ways to make your computer do more for you. This book outlines 10 main principles of being a lifehacker, organized into 88 life-hacks that range from taking great notes to accessing your personal wiki on your home computer from work:
Chapter 1: Free Up Mental RAM
Gina explains how to relieve your mind of the brambles of ideas, notes, and tasks so you can concentrate on the task at hand. My favorite tip here is using Flickr to develop your (Digital) photographic memory by taking pictures of signs with store hours, possible gifts, insurance photos, or items that will remind you of something you might need to do. A good lifehacker always has resources to write down ideas or a way to remind yourself
later - even in the bathroom.
Chapter 2: Firewall Your Attention
This chapter focuses on creating your own personal firewall so that you can get in the zone and stay there.
stop checking your e-mail 50 times a day and try to keep it to 2-3 times
We learn about how to reduce e-mail interruptions and make your house a usable home.
Create a “landing strip” for your keys, mail, etc. by your door so that you can drop them there and deal with them all at once later
Chapter 3: Automate Repetitive Tasks
Your computer should automatically backup your stuff and e-mail it to you, defragment itself (if you aren’t on a Mac :D), clean up junk files, download podcasts, restart itself and start all your useful programs, and log your work for you. It takes some setup, but my wife appreciates the 15 hours a week I save not worrying about this stuff. All of these can be found at lifehacker.com
Chapter 4: Streamline Common Tasks
Most common tasks that are ad-hoc should be able to be launched in a few (5 or less) keystrokes. Launching programs and searching should be effortless. Personally, I love Launchy for this.
This chapter is all over the place, showing you how to send money to your phone or e-mail address to quick launching programs.
Use BugMeNot to bypass site registrations
Chapter 5: Get Your Data to Go
Most everything you need should be accessable from a computer. Carry Portable Apps and data on your thumb drive or iPod SECURELY. Run and access a home web server. Turn your phone into a modem. Use Gmail as your internet hard drive.
Chapter 6: Control Your Email
Empty your inbox into the “Trusted Trio”: Action, Archive, and Hold. Action for stuff you need to deal with now, Archive for everything that you could possibly need in the future, and Hold for messages that you may need quick access to in the next few days. Use a search utility (Google Desktop) to search that Archive folder effectively.
Forever007usa@geocities.com is no longer an appropriate e-mail address
Chapter 7: Organize Your Stuff
Use del.icio.us for bookmarks so you can tag, search and share them - from anywhere. Google Desktop for search (yeah, they have a Linux version too). KeePass for passwords. And would you please “give your paperwork a spacious place to live”?
Chapter 8: Kickstart Your Productivity
Here we find out how to make a to-do list that you can actually uh…do. I use Remember The Milk, but many are not using Todoist.
Tasks that suck are best dashed through (with a timer, even)
Also, “Think Time” is important, always make time for yourself because it really does help you sort things out quickly.
Chapter 9: Master the Web
An absolute treasure of a chapter if I may say so. We learn tips for Googling, how to extend our favorite browser, bookmarklets (stay tuned for a big post about this later), use Google’s cached pages features, and map your data.
Chapter 10: Tune Your Computer
Finally, Gina explains hacks that are meant to make and keep your now working-for-you computer running quickly. These tips include how to completely erase data, how to retrieve deleted files (not completely erased), how to spot problems early and recover your files should something really bad happen. I would say after using these that my computer was noticibly faster, but not stupid fast.
Conclusion
Most of these life-hacks can be found online, but there is still something about having it in print so you don’t have to go through all the work of hitting Alt-Tab all those times and searching them all out yourself. $25 is also very reasonable for all this info. However, do not consider this book if you are not comfortable with making changes to your computer and even your
lifestyle because you might never be the same.
A 24 year-old programmer for
I really like GTDTiddlyWiki for managing all of my todo lists and other projects. It is a self contained HTML file with a nice ajaxy feel. Its based on a model described in David Allen’s book: Getting Things Done.
Thanks, Casey! A few people I work with use a personal wiki for everything as well. Google Notebook and Remember the Milk is my system.