How To Hack Life: A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking Down (and Solving) Life’s Problems

The fine art of life hacking stems from geek (specially programming) culture and is a term I shied away from for a while because of it’s buzz-wordiness, but it’s undeniable: life hacking is what I love.

What life hacking actually is remains somewhat debated, with hardcore geeks defending its roots while most fellow bloggers use the term to describe unconventional tricks in any aspect of life. Personally, I consider life hacking to be the sustained effort towards solving a problem that has an unclear, wavering solution, often involving the use of technology.

As an example, say you have the problem of wanting to travel the world with very little technology, but manage a small business that needs to have orders fulfilled, customer support questions answered and marketing taken care of. There are a billion and one ways to approach this problem – the solution is unclear and has no quick fix.

What constitutes as “little technology”? Would you sacrifice a portion of profits for the advantage of flexibility? How willing are you to restructure the business? All these questions and more work their way into the life hack.

You may start with the consideration of taking a netbook with you, but then discover a device like the IronKey and the PortableApps software package and realise you could probably work well enough from internet cafes and other public computers. On your quest for enhanced automation within the business The E-Myth provides you with the knowledge needed to implement systems, and remove yourself from the day to day functions.

In the 3rd week of your travels, you realise working from internet cafes is more difficult than it sounded. Loud teenagers, low performance computers and uncomfortable working areas calls for some deliberation. What about working earlier in the day to avoid the noise? And carefully crafting to do lists and plans with pen and paper in your down time to minimise your time at the computer itself? Maybe you could simply outsource more work that you’ve previously been uncomfortable with letting go?

That process, that evolution from an initial thought, to theories and finally a workable solution is life hacking, and it’s a process I want to take you through.

Identify bugs. Spending hours each day reading about the latest Gmail productivity tips is the antithesis of life hacking, but it’s how many people approach it, they absorb all the hacks, tricks and tips humanly possible and figure they’ll eventually come in handy. In the process they lose the life they intended to hack.

In this video Merlin Mann satirises this phenomena brilliantly (NSFW):
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/7173596[/vimeo]

The better approach for getting started is to identify the most prevalent bugs in your life and work on fixing them. If you’re not sure what to get started on here are a few common problems that most people try to fix first:

• Email overload.
• Lack of free time.
• Lethargy.
• Waking up too late.
• Unorganized finances.

When identifying what problems you want to tackle list them all out from most painful, the ones causing you the most stress to least painful, the ones causing you the least stress.

You can then take two roads to solving them:

• Start with the most painful problem, because then solving the rest is a downhill slope.
• Start with the least painful problem and build momentum to tackle the more complex bugs.

Don’t hack life for hacking’s sake. Use the almighty power of logical thinking on genuine bumps in the road of life (that was cheesy, I know).

Uninstall. What’s the first thing Windows users should do when they connect to the internet? Download Firefox and uninstall Internet Explorer of course! (Or at the very least, make sure IE isn’t the default browser.)

Life hacking works in the same way. Don’t try to hack your way through crap. No amount of configuring or ignorant hope will save IE, nor will you be able to solve a problem that isn’t worth solving for the same reasons. You could spend years working out how to make a turd into a hat using lasers and technical wizardry, but at the end of the day you’ve still got faeces sitting on your noggin.

Before dedicating any time to solving a bug in your life ask yourself “Is there some way I can simply eliminate the need for a solution?” It’s easier than it sounds.

One problem I was pondering a while ago was how to effectively manage a range of web-based projects I’d planned to launch before eventually vagabonding around the world. I had two roads I could’ve taken:

• Work out a complex system and strict timetable to allow me to get the necessary work done.
• Focus on building one project and making it amazing.

I chose the latter option (this blog).

Critics may respond with, “So you’re proposing you take the easy way out?” Yes. Yes I am. The easy way out is often the route of utmost simplicity, not just a path for the lazy, but people are afraid to take it because it’s common to synonymies complexity with superiority.

Don’t hack your way through the unnecessary.

Find your settings. We all operate in different ways, with both our bodies and minds functioning differently based on the time of day, our environment, who’s with us, and any other external elements. Controlling these elements is a key component to brainstorming and problem solving effectively.

What I find helpful is to simply lift the approach of varying writers, and try their systems. There are plenty of opinions on when one should write:

• Write from 9-5. Do not stop.
• Work with your body, and if you don’t get much written, then so be it.
• Stay up late and write between midnight and 4am.
• Wake up early and write first thing.
• Just freakin’ write whenever.

That final point is surprisingly valid in my experience, because I can attest to the nature of random inspiration and the benefit of being always being prepared but in my own tests staying up late is the clearly defined time slot that works for me.

It’s at these times where previously daunting problems shrink considerably as the distractions of the day – ringing phones, television, noisy cars – disappear, giving you the ability to get lost in your life hacking quest. In essence finding the times you work best is a bit of life hack in itself, and a worthy one to pursue.

Preferring to be an early riser I expected writing late at night to be painful, but once I gave it a go I was surprisingly tackling troubles more efficiently than I had at the times I often defaulted too.

But I’m blabbing on about time. Time, while the most important in terms of mental capacity, isn’t the only component in your setting. Your environment and how you interact with that environment (ergonomics essentially) the 2nd piece of the puzzle.

Right now, at this very moment I’m sitting back on my couch, my feet propped up a coffee table, a lamp turned on to my left, and plenty of open space. I chose this space for a reason. Being able to lounge casually makes writing feel less like a chore, and more like I’m having a conversation. The footrest lets me lie back in a way that avoids neck pain, and adequate lighting helps my eyes open and brain alert. Finally, the open space eliminates the weariness that a cubicle-like space would bring with it.

Did I consciously choose all of these positive components of my environment? No.  But that’s because I’ve worked in a number of areas in my house on purpose and this simply felt the most right. I know how easy it is to fall into the habit of using an unergonomic environment though, so ask yourself, right now, “Am I comfortable?” Look around you, what could be moved? Improved? Removed?

Sitting hunched over your laptop, on an uncomfortable chair without enough light resulting in eye strain won’t make tackling the larger problems in life any easier. Be mindful of your settings, and put them to work for you.

Brood. What I consider to be the most underrated aspect of life hacking, actually, no, of life in general is the misrepresented act of brooding. It’s not just for evil geniuses or disgruntled seniors driven by their hatred of those damn kids on their lawn, it’s the best way to sprout a genuine range of unique ideas and solutions.

“Brood over your text and your topic. Brood over them until they become mellow and responsive. You will hatch out of them a flock of promising ideas as you cause the tiny germs of life there contained to expand and develop…” (How to Develop Self-Confidence & Influence People by Public Speaking, Dale Carnegie.)

But I’ve noticed that quite a few people find it surprisingly difficult to brood, to sit and think about a topic for any reasonable length of time. Perhaps this is just their extraversion on show, but lacking the ability to brood points to some other things:

• Unable to focus on a single idea (monkey-mind as Buddhist’s call it). Learn how to quiet your mind and begin jotting down ideas as quickly as possible.
• Boredom. You’re probably trying to hack your way towards something unexciting. Only bother to find solutions for problems you care deeply about. Saving 5c creating your own toilet paper isn’t worth being bored brooding.
• Too much energy. Would you rather jump up and down on the couch and do cart wheels rather than sit back and ponder? Delegate the brooding aspect of life hacking to down times, either just before bed, after a big meal or early in the morning.

Plan. The act of hacking your life is very much a planning-based process (unless you stumble across life hacks, but that’s somewhat rare). After identifying the problem you want to solve, finding your settings, researching (Googling) and doing some brooding, you have to get your brain juices flowing out into a logical process of actionable items. Exciting stuff.

For a plan to be effective you need to do a few things:

• Be specific. Use numbers and include seemingly insignificant details. Treat a plan as a document that anyone should be able to pick up and follow clearly.
• Reduce. The less steps the better. Regularly revise your plan to remove as much of the clutter as possible. This becomes easier once you’ve actually put the plan into action and begin to see inefficiencies.
• Use conditionals. The #1 rule of planning is to remember that nothing goes according to plan. Base your plan around the best-case scenario but also list solutions to problems that make crop up.

Most of the time I prefer to plan with pen and paper, or when I’m feeling high tech use a text editor, but if you’re interested in creating fancy plans using process charts, then check out lovelycharts.com. The free version is somewhat limited, but it’s a great tool nevertheless.

Open source your mind. Privacy is something very important to me, I don’t want to share my entire life via the internet, but there’s certainly value in open sourcing your mind, it’s what I’m doing with this blog.

What I mean my open sourcing your mind is simple: put your thoughts and solutions out into the world and see how others use, apply and change them. The feedback and results that come back can then positively affect your own ability to streamline solutions.

Although I write with a level of authority on purpose (can’t stand wishy-washiness) I feel like everything I say is open for debate. I believe my ideas wholeheartedly at the time of writing but the moment I tackle writing from a stand point of “this is the solution to your problem and there is no better way” is the same moment my usefulness dries up and I stop growing.

I want debates. I want readers insights. I want to be wrong. But most relevantly, I want a platform where I can share my life hacking escapades and receive input from a much larger audience than would be in the offline world. This blog is my brain dump that drives me to find real, practical solutions to the problems that pop up and makes use of the readers own knowledge.

Starting a blog isn’t necessary though, any type of platform will do, including just a Twitter account if you’re good at finding and connecting with people. But after a blog I reckon becoming active in a relevant forum would be the best options. Steve Pavlina’s personal development forums are full of people’s personal projects and life hacking adventures.

Collaborate. Contrary to the geek stereotype it is alright to stop playing Starcraft in your parents basement at times and interact with fellow human beings. To be honest, this is something I should do more myself but let’s not turn this into a game of outing the socially inept. (Oh, and Modern Warfare 2 is my crux, not Starcraft.)

Think of our minds as spheres. They hold a certain volume of information both consciously and subconsciously. Only a small portion of what we know we can bring into the real world, but the point is we know some stuff and don’t know other stuff. Every other mind is the same.

When two or more minds come together however, they overlap, venn diagram style, and it’s in that middle sector where the minds overlap that breakthroughs are made by feeding off each others experiences, memories and ideas.

Napoleon Hill discussed collaboration in his self-help classic Think and Grow Rich on the topic of mastermind groups:

“The Mastermind principle consists of an alliance of two or more minds working in perfect harmony for the attainment of a common definite objective.

No two minds ever come together without a third invisible force, which may be likened to a “third mind.” When a group of individual minds are coordinated and function in harmony, the increased energy created through that alliance becomes available to every individual in the group.

No man can become a permanent success without taking others along with him.”

Find both similarly and differently minded individuals to collaborate with on your life hacking adventures. You don’t need to label this as a life hacking “club” or anything quite so embarrassing. Simply have an understanding of what everyone (including yourself) wants out of life and be there to listen and offer advice when their problems arise. The others will reciprocate when need be.

Consume. While I began the point about identifying bugs with a rant on how many people consume needless amounts of information before they actually identify the reason they’re doing it, I’m not totally against being an information consumer.

Life hacking is a knowledge-based hobby. The more you know and the more you’re exposed too, the more effective solutions you’ll be able to create.

One life hack I was trying to work on (on the back burner at the moment) for example was how to manage this blog completely from an iPhone. Everything, from publishing to comment moderation is possible, but it’s the crucial act of typing where the system falls apart. Sure, I could just use the onscreen keyboard, but pumping out over 1000 words (or 4000 words in this case) isn’t exactly convenient.

But, my point is, the very concept of this (blogging without a computer) was only made aware to me because talk of an external keyboard for the iPhone crossed my radar. I would’ve been oblivious to the possibilities, to the inspiration if I weren’t an avid information consumer.

Perhaps the trickiest part of this though is managing information overload. You don’t want to be bogged down with hundreds of articles in your blog reader each day or anything, and I’m certainly not. Here are a few quick tips:

• Use the 80:20 rule. 80% of the important information comes from 20% of blogs (in reality the ratio is more like 99:1). Find the absolutely top blogs and subscribe to them. Fever is my blog reader of choice because of it’s slick interface and ability to calculate the hottest content of the past days, weeks and months.
• Self-audit. Every month or so ask yourself “Has this information source provided me with genuine value in the last month?” If not, cut it loose. Don’t waste time digesting content in hopes of it one day being relevant.
• Follow curators. The social web is a web of curators, people who bring together relevant pieces of content through the power of human editing. Anyone who actively shares links on Twitter is a curator, but sites like Tumblr and Posterous are full of great resources about niche topics that centralize the web’s information.

Re-iterate. The first solution isn’t the best solution. When you stumble across what you think is a great solution to a problem be glad that you’ve made a breakthrough, but understand the best is yet to come. Version #2 of your solution will be better, and so will version #3 etc.

But constant, never ending reiteration does nobody any good. There has to be a point where you put your ideas into practice, and that point is as soon as possible. Put the first solution into practice as soon as possible, and then as you uncover flaws or inefficiencies adapt.

Continue the adaptation process until you feel your life hack is near perfect. Utter perfection is a fruitless goal to strive for, but you can at least throw together some ideas and processes that are good enough.

As an example, say you wanted to eliminate your use of email because you felt it was becoming too much of a leash. That’s a mighty ambitious life hack for some and could certainly face plenty of hiccups along the way.

You put together some strategies to make the change possible, and trial it for a week. After a week you receive complaints that you’re lack of communication makes it difficult for others to make decisions. This is where it’s time to re-iterate, where changes need to be made, and where most life hackers will jump ship out of fear of uncertainty and inability to be comfortable with mistakes.

Taking too long between concept to implementation leads to the nasty offset of over thinking, which sounds harmless but will highlight flaws that are unlikely to ever arise, causing you stop before you get anywhere. Start soon, fail fast, and repeat.

Build a brain bank. A brain bank is a centralised database where you can quickly dump your thoughts and research to eliminate the need to remember everything yourself and wander back through your thought process. Plenty of software out there accommodates for that – Notational Velocity, Google Docs, Backpack – but Evernote is my personal choice.

The developers of Evernote describe it as your second brain and I feel that description is very apt. Over the past year or so I’ve dumped an ungodly amount of musings into the application and with their clever character recognition and full text searching no thought is out of reach or lost in the fray.

Your brain is your most powerful life hacking tool. Give it the support it deserves by storing important information in a logical manner, at the reach of your fingertips.

Mind map it. A simple outline is how I like to solve most problems, but for bigger and more complex life hacking mountains must be traversed nothing beats some good ol’ fashioned flow charts and mind maps.

While not specifically a life hack, I have been pondering the concept of money for quite a while. Not how to get it (or lose it for that matter) but the ethics of capitalism and the problems of attachment, greed and sustainability concerns. A sheet of paper wouldn’t be enough to tackle this mammoth.

For more ambitious ideas, mindmeister.com is the best mind mapping tool available for free and has the benefit of being web-based so anyone with an internet browser can use it.

Eliminate bottlenecks. In the world of computer hardware a bottleneck is a particular component that limits the effectiveness of other components. For example, you may have a top end video card, but a lacklustre CPU will negate its higher performance. Our weaknesses are our bottlenecks.

Everyone has weak points. As an introvert talking with others for extended periods of time can suck the energy out of me, and I regularly procrastinate with putting ideas into action, spending far too much time in the planning and brooding stages.

Does that mean I should make How To Win Friends & Influence People my Bible and hack my way to 0% procrastination? No.

While improving as a conversationalist and becoming more action-oriented would be worthy life hacking projects I feel it’s best to work with your strengths unless there’s a compelling reason to do otherwise (such as a weakness being a major pain point or cause of stress).

Finding your strengths is as simple as working your way from your weaknesses. An introverted personality brings with it the comfortability of being alone and mulling over ideas in my mind. What I lose in terms of collaboration is somewhat made up for with the strength of focus intensely on a particular problem for longer periods than most extroverts could.

The lack of action is more of a hindrance, because it is better to test than ponder, yet over-planning still isn’t a major negative, it just slows things down a bit, but ties back into the positive of intense mental focus.

Downgrade. Word processing software? GTD applications? Livescribe pens? When did the simple act of thinking, brainstorming and solving problems become so damn convoluted? I’m far from becoming Amish or anything, but you have to admit, there’s irony in attempting to hack life through a computer screen.

Pick up a cheap notebook from your local office supplies store, get a pen (pro tip: walk past a large school and there’ll probably be one lying in the gutter), go to your setting, sit back, and write.

Time and time again I hear, and experience the magic art of putting pen to paper. Something amazing happens and the ideas begin to flow, life becomes simpler, and you can lose yourself in it. There’s no eye strain, contorted postures or blinking distractions. You can find your flow.

Shut down. Turn off your computer and do something else. And no, this isn’t just a re-iteration of the Downgrade point. Dedicate time to doing stuff for the hell of it. I know how addictive life hacking can be.

After a while you begin to notice hundred’s of little problems in your life, even hypothetical ones, and before you know it your work space is overflowing with process maps, research and evidence of iteration. Sit outside in the sun, read a book, go for a walk. Your problems will still be there when you get back.

How do you hack life? This is the process I follow when it comes to life hacking. You may be wondering, do I consciously follow through with these steps? Nope. Because my approach evolved naturally over time it’s never really something I thought about until now. For that reason there may be some bits missing, so feel free to ask me any questions, but also share your thoughts – how do you hack life?

Photo: James Jordan

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