My recent discovery is Lifehacking. When you work with the computer for 10 hours a day on average (not mentioning iPhone time) you get easily distracted. Although internet can stimulate your brain function, your attention is under constant electronic attack and you might find yourself in a situation when you won't get things done. Study from University of California at Irvine shows that "you are interrupted once every 11 minutes; after any interruption, you take 25 minutes to return to your task".So the question is how to improve my daily interaction with computer, mobile phone and media? How to 'firewall my attention'? How to increase a control over time I spend at work?
The answer is: Lifehacking. A series of tricks, hints and hacks that you apply in your daily existence to make things better between you, your devices and your time.
Gina Trapani wrote an ultimate geek guide with 116 small hacks described, on different levels of difficulty. You don't need to use them all, the point is to read this book as a hypertext page, where you jump only to the hacks that are useful for you.
This is definitely my book of the month.
PS: I would say this post is for Dr Dude-Chick who is my pal in the journey for searching new ways to optimize life ;-)
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ReplyDeleteThanks for the link to the book, are you reading it in the hardware-paper version then?
I have already read some articles on the website through various feeds that I get.
All the things (getting the email, bookmarks and files organized) are already on my to-do lists. About some I am already procrastinating for two years now.
So how do you get from reading about those tips and actually implementing them in your life and making them Good Habits?....
Thanks! I got the paper version. So far I've found two chapters very useful (firewall your attention and tricking yourself in getting things done) and I am using a number of hacks from all other chapters. The key there is that some hacks are really very simple and you basically apply them in an hour or so, and things look better after that:) Still, you will find a lot of stuff that is basically a shortcut-copy from well-known self-help book. Still no perfect solution there, until we write it ourselves at some point ;-)
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the book and I'm not really into optimizing my productivity (I tend to keep it low), but I know Gina Trapani from the TWiG podcast, she's very smart, and a programmer at that :)
ReplyDeleteBTW, e-readers for the win, time to upgrade.
Yes, I was considering Amazon Kindle, because it is now available internationally but... they scaled it down! You can't use their experimental web browser, you can't use blog function, plus they send you version with US power supply, so you need to buy expensive transformer. Yes, you got 3G access for free to download books or newspapers but... It still cost you around £170, and you can't share books with others, and there is a chance they will charge you some customs tax... Rubbish... I might consider Nobles & Barnes Nook. Simlar price, but so many cool features, you can lend the books, etc.
ReplyDeleteWhat's your bid?
geek: I looked at their website with milions of unorganized tricks and tips and decided to get a book. I ordered it on Amazon to get on on Sat ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe structure of the content works much better for me, even though I think paper is slowly becoming obsolete!
Which well-known self-help book? :-o
About Kindle: there is a kindle books reader for iPhone and iPod touch, so you do not need the device itself. And you can read pdf format ebooks on them too, so overall it is a much more versatile device.
It does not resemble the book, like the e-ink display does, but who cares? Who needs two devices if one would do?
DrDudeChick: I meant David Allen's 'Getting Things Done';-)
ReplyDeleteI think iPhone is a horrible solution as a e-reader. Its just too small, and unfortunatelly its not ergonomic enough to hold it for a long time. You get neck and arm pains. Plus the screen needs to be e-ink based, otherwise my eyes would burn after 2 hours reading. So my e-reader needs to be minimum 6", very thin, high-quality e-ink, all format displaying, and internet acccess enabled. I estimated that I would mostly read scientific journals on it, so it has to be fairly easy to tranfer different files into it. I think that you underestimeting the ergonomics of the book here, iPhone is just crap for reading.