What are some of your best life hacks? Not just limited to tech, although it is pretty ripe for hacking. I'm interested in social interaction-based hacks, too.
Focusing on actual productivity instead of all the apps, software, and techniques to get things done. It's taken a while to learn that, but a very valuable lesson in my opinion.
If I am in a conversation with another developer because they asked for my help I will stop talking if it looks like they are 1. either ignoring my advice 2. or have understood enough and are busy doing what they need to do or 3. are busy doing something completely different.
This way I don't waste my time, and I can quickly get back to what I was doing. I tend to spend a lot of time explaining concepts even to people that may know what I am talking about so that I don't have to be interrupted again.
I work better while in an almost empty room with no movement around me and no noises other than the music I am playing.
I tend to spend too much time multitasking so I have disabled all of the notification features on most of the apps I use (such as Mail.app, Adium, Twitter, and others) now they can't interrupt me with an badge stating how many messages I still have unread in my Inbox. It has given me a cleaner experience.
Socially I have started cutting out those people that only demand my time but don't provide me with anything. There is no reason why I should be spending my time writing a long reply when I know you are not going to read it or provide some sort of adequate answer to the questions I posed in an attempt to help you. This is in real life as well, phone calls and the like.
I've been running iTerm and MacVim in fullscreen mode and that alone has done wonders for my productivity. I like the idea of closing Adium and the mail app, but I just don't know if I could do it! I feel paranoid when they're not open.
Don't close them, just remove any of the icons that show up. For Adium for example turn off the default jumping action, and sound action, and just leave up a small badge if you require it to feel safe, or turn that off as well. Now your chat client becomes more like email.
I wanted to listen to my music in a way that my iPod wouldn't allow. So that day, about a week ago, I wrote an app to play my music the way I wanted. It has a big button, when pressed once marks that position of the song, twice immediately loops from the first mark to the second.
I felt like I had just grabbed a wrench or something and fixed a part of my life, but the wrench was Xcode.
I just used some of the 'classic' built in features. Nothing too fancy, just loop over whatever part of the song you choose however many times you choose.
I'm not trying to sound extra cool, if that's the reason why I'm being modded down. Those are just hacks I did when I was a lot more foolish than today. As with many things, the actual implementation is quite lame and dubious...
Escaping classes: we had these forms where we were supposed to enter our missed classes and then present them to the various teachers for signature at the end of the month. The weakness of this concept was that teachers had gotten so used to the forms that they didn't keep records of their own when people failed to show up. If you simply "forgot" to fill out and present the form 80% of the time, they would happily sign the other 20% without getting suspicious. Of course, after about a year of this, some of them were on to me, but since I always showed up for exams I guess we came to a silent agreement. One time, a teacher figured out what I was doing and asked me point blank; I admitted everything and to my surprise he said it was OK but I shouldn't tell anyone.
Skipping phys ed was harder. We had several sub-groups with different teachers. Turns out, when you left one sub-group for another, but failed to show up at the new one, nobody noticed because the new and the old teacher didn't ever speak to one another. This only worked because I didn't even show up once at the "new" teacher's lessons so she didn't know who I was. It sounds cool, but it almost got me expelled when school administration found out after two years. However, maybe I got lucky, they were simply incompetent, or they just decided to not care, because after the "formal investigation" was announced, I never heard from them again. Maybe they were ashamed that something like that could actually happen and since I never bragged about this exploit they just chose to ignore it.
Getting past assistants: this involves flat-out lying, which is why I don't do this shit anymore (nor do I need to at my current job, thank the gods). I believe assistants are in constant fear of screwing up. They're supposed to screen the calls and weed out people who just want to sell stuff to their boss, but at the same time they're terrified of false positives. So I basically implied that I knew their bosses. It worked almost every single time, the lies just had to be bold enough. Like, "oh, when we were playing Tennis the other week he said I should coordinate with you about getting an appointment in this month". Stuff like that.
Getting girls: leaving aside the classic wingman tactics at parties (most of which involve either distracting a girl's friends in order to isolate her and/or putting on a show to appear cooler), this one is actually more of a self-hack. It involves faking confidence and importance, and saying things that sound smart because they're prepared in advance.
Last time one of these threads came up, someone mentioned using the privileged security lines even without a first class ticket or whatever frequent-flyer status you need. I just flew out of Chicago and skipped a pretty decent sized line without any fuss from anyone.
Yeah those lines operate via the honor code. No one is actually going to stop you. That said I consider line jumping to be cheating, not a "life hack".
Putting myself in positions where I have to pull through.
Like signing up to be a TA at the university -- now I know that I have to really master the course content.
Or telling people that I do/will do x and y.. so now I have to do x and y or else I'm a hypocrite and that sure would be bad. I tell my friends that I get out of bed by counting down out loud from 5..0, and that I ALWAYS get out of bed at 0. And I've convinced myself that I'm a hypocrite or fool of some sort if I don't follow through, just because i told people.
Also made a fun screen scraper last week for a course at the University that filled up with only Seniors and Juniors(has at least 100 students trying to get in). Crontabs to run my script which logs me into the course website and checks the spot availability of the class(and then alerts me if it's open). That's fun because only me and the other CS kids could possibly do this.
Can you expand on how one would get started writing such a script? I've been meaning to do something like this for a while (partially as a legit exercise, partially for fun).
A notebook large enough to comfortably dump your thoughts into but small enough to be always near your keyboard is awesome. The notebook helps with procrastination, especially when avoiding some gnarly bit of code you don't know how to write. I just start describing the problem and how I might solve it.
> That said, if you're looking at something worse than a traffic violation--invoke every possible right that you can.
Definitely true – I'm assuming we're talking speeding tickets or missed road sign of some sort. If you're transporting drugs or weapons, or driving under the influence, that's a whole other deal.
Hack:
Don't transport anything illegal, including an inebriated driver.
My favorite speeding ticket escape hatch goes something like this:
1. Get pulled over for speeding.
2. Have your windows rolled down when the officer walks up to your car, hands on the wheel, &c.
3. Preemptively, "Hi, officer. I know I was speeding. I'm sorry, but if I don't get home and go to the bathroom right now, I'm going to need a new pair of pants." Delivery matters, obviously, but it's not hard.
4. Get sent on my merry way.
100% success rate, for a far smaller sample size than I should have, given how I tend to drive.
That said, danilocampos' advice holds. In the one instance where I was caught speeding egregiously, playing the situation as described got my ticket reduced below the magic "10 MPH over" threshold, where the violation is typically also reported to your insurance carrier, leaving aside the reduction in ticket cost.
Moreover, that was after he had to chase me for almost half a mile. His car was an unmarked Mustang, with no siren and recessed flashers, so I simply didn't see him until he pulled in behind me and blocked me into my parking spot at the office.
He was obviously expecting a worst-case scenario after a chase like that (hand on his sidearm as he approached my car, &c). My courtesy and honesty helped defray would could've otherwise been a deep pile of suck.
(I also don't speed much on that road any more. Go figure.)
If you do get a ticket, hire an attorney who just deals with tickets. $400 and it's almost guaranteed to go away, with no impact on your points, insurance, etc. The $400 easily outweighs the NPV of the recurring costs over the next few years.
I don't really keep a traditional to-do list anymore. I tried GTD several times over the last 5 years and it's just too cumbersome (and having a huge to-do list is pretty daunting). I keep high-level project to-dos organized in Basecamp, project ideas are organized in soywiki, and any critical reminders are in Google Calendar (with alerts).
The real hack that I do though is every morning I take a post-it note and write down 3 things that I will finish that day. Then I stick it to my monitor and do the things. After that, I relax and play Starcraft 2 or work on personal projects.
Before I started using the post-it note, I would have a day or two where I was really productive, followed by several days of lackluster productivity. Now, by committing to fewer items per day but actually accomplishing them all, I'm way more productive overall, my clients are happier, and I'm actually making progress on my personal projects.
I'm also using the post-it note. But thing I've noticed is that when I write my to-do list the day before, I'm more productive.
Because:
- I don't waste time figuring out what I need to do when I'm most productive (mornings)
- I already know what my day will looks like the night before, which gives me some ease of mind
I also tried several GTD systems and ended up spending almost a whole day writing my own that for me replaces a piece of note paper. Really simple, but just what I wanted. (Freely hosted at http://my-foc.us/ and that page has a link to the code at github).
Get good at every system (software or otherwise) you depend on, and stick with them. Don't take on new systems until it hurts too much not to.
For me, this means that I run the same GTD/Pomodoro routine day in and day out using Remember the Milk. And I won't evaluate alternatives until I can't help but.
Use the other door. The next time you're in a crowded place, like a mall, and lots of people are trying to enter or exit, take notice. Almost 100% of the time, most of the people will all be filing through one door that is open because other people are going through it. This is despite the fact that there is probably one or more perfectly good doors to the left or right of it.
Something similar for revolving doors. Most venues that have revolving doors also have normal doors for wheelchairs, deliveries, or whatever. Stick a large group of people together, and they start clumping up trying to go through the revolver, instead of just going through the other doors.
Being aware of this crowd behavior is a great way to bypass lines, avoid frustration, and beat the crowd.
On the topic of doors. I have a hack that speeded up transit and benefited many many people daily.
There was a main entrance gate at my old high school. There was four sets of double door that opened out, that allowed students into the campus. These doors are damn heavy and one night I was cruising with my friend and I told him, I got an idea. I refused to answer any of his inquiries.
We arrived at the high school, I climbed up onto the top of the gate. On each door was the little hydraulic system to stop the doors from slamming shut ( know what I'm sayin?)
These hydraulic arms were just little planks of metal. I pushed them down with my foot. This created tension when the door closed on the two arms. Instead of sliding freely(and the door closing), the arms rub and create enough friction to hold the door open.
Now instead of the doors swinging close, they remain open daily, until they are closed for the night. Every day I would walk through them, and see every other student walking through my simple little hack that got the doors to stay open all day.
tl;dr: Hacked some doors at my old high school so they would stay open instead of closing.
Edit: My logic is: I used the doors... four times a day average. Took three seconds to open and walk through vs one second to just walk through. So two seconds to open. About 180 days of school times four years.
180x4x2/60= 24 minutes
While not substantial, I just saved a person 24 minutes of their life.
Like. I do these type of time-saving calculations in my head whenever someone like the bus driver drives too slow and fails to make a light, thus costing everyone on the bus an extra minute of their lives.
You actually saved 24 minutes times, say, 3000 students, which is 24*3000/60/24 = 50 human days saved over the span of four years. Not to mention, this hack may well have lived on since you've graduated, so that's many more days of savings. Nice.
Here is a hack for you: Doors that are hung slightly off center or with self closing hinges close mostly for convenience. Hydraulic or electrical closers like you encountered are more expensive, and only installed when they are required for some reason (security, child safety, fire doors, etc).
You mentioned four sets of double doors, which also indicates the designer knew the requirement for positive closure would be a flow issue and added extra doors. Had there not been a really good reason for having the doors be closed they probably wouldn't have planned for the extra doors.
I know you believe your "hack" was innocent enough, but essentially you vandalized a system someone carefully thought out to save yourself 24 minutes over 4 years.
I don't know the architecture of your high school or the reasoning behind the positive closure doors, but I hope to god they were not part of a firewall (walls and closed doors designed to prevent fire from spreading through a building faster than it can be safely evacuated).
I can generalize this tip a bit further: always understand your surroundings. Look for optimization.
The other morning I drove up to the bank's drive-thru. There are two lanes of teller+ATMs, but for some reason this morning the second lane had a red X over the lane, meaning there was not a teller manning the manual transaction tube.
But the ATM was still working, the green light was on. But guess what? The other 5 cars saw the X and decided to queue for the other ATM. I swooped right up to the free machine, got my cash, and left. I would have waited 20 minutes in the other line.
Life is an experiment. Whatever you do, try, learn, iterate.
Remember, though, that time is your precious resource. You'll never, ever get it back. All life hacks must either extend your time, shorten tasks, or make your time more meaningful.
Here are a few things that came to mind:
Productivity:
* Make a check list. Once you start, you won't be able to believe that you lived life without one. Can't overstate this one.
* I wrote a script that takes screenshots every half minute and lets me see what I've been doing. Huge time-saver. Check-lists also help.
Mental/Spiritual/Creative Well-being:
* Read an actual book that's actually not on a screen. Don't do anything else concurrently.
* Keep short, creative side-projects/weekend projects that you can be excited about. It'll keep your creative juices flowing.
* If you're in a rut, start saying "yes" to things more. It's too easy to stay in.
Fitness:
* Cold shower in the morning, and/or swimming in cold water. A few minutes of this and you'll feel like you ran 10 miles.
* If you're going to enjoy soda or something bad for you, enjoy it in small sips.
* F.lux for your eyes.
* Eat when you're hungry or low on energy. Don't eat when you're not hungry or not low on energy.
Social interaction:
* "Flirt" with everybody. Men and women. Don't overdo it or be weird about it, but the qualities that are successful in flirting tend to be endearing.
* Pay attention to people. "Being there" mentally can be hard, especially when you're tired or your company is tiring, but you've got to try.
* Low self-confidence is a road to all bad things. You're better than that.
* "I like your shirt/watch/shoes/bag" and get ready to hear a story.
* If you can use someone's name, use it. If you can't (and I forget names _all the time_) see if you can introduce a nearby friend.
->* Need help remembering names? Apparently this is an old sales trick (I haven't tried it but it's brilliant): index names in your phone book by category, as you may know WHERE you know a person from but may not be able to remember their name. So for a guy you know from college and whose number you have but you can't remember his name, you can go through your "College" contacts to find "College Ted." Hopefully the name resonates when you see it; I haven't tried this yet.
Time for sleep, I think, but hope these are helpful to someone...
This is really a great list. I think the best of all is the "flirt with everybody" thing. So right. Nothing comes without training, and chances is it will influence people almost no matter how good you look like (except of course if you really smell or really appear unnatural, which you address anyway in the next bullet).
I used to be bad at names, but eventually I figured out if I repeat a name a few times within seconds of learning it, I generally remember it. "Hi Kevin, nice to meet you, I'm Pat. I was going over there to refresh my drink, you need anything Kevin?" It can sound a little weird, but it's made a huge difference for me, and people love it when you remember and use their name.
Quit drinking so much soda, and switch to diet when you do. (I lost a ton of weight like this. Seriously, a bottle of Coke is over 200 calories. If you drink multiple sodas a day, you can cut out the caloric equivalent of a Big Mac and fries without altering what you eat at all.)
Buy as many monitors as you can fit on your desk. Consider a bigger desk.
Almost everyone should cut their sugar/artificial sugar intake at least. I'm quite skinny and am working on gaining muscle, I don't want to lose weight, but for the last two weeks I've abstained from soda, candy and white carbohydrates (wheat, pasta, spagetti). It has made a huge difference on my energy level, feeling of well being (every day is just "better") and skin quality.
Saturday is my cheat day where I'm allowed to eat everything I want. I ate a pizza and drank a bottle of soda. The pizza was great, but the soda was way too sweet for me. I literary had to force myself to drink the rest (I don't know why I felt I had to empty it). Today I woke up feeling tired the same way I used to feel before I started eating/drinking better and with a huge pimple in my forehead.
> Almost everyone should cut their sugar/artificial sugar intake at least.
Then we should be talking about that, not cutting calories and losing weight. I think I could use more energy, feeling of well being and skin quality. But I suspect that if I just throw away carbohydrates from my ration, I won't be able to get up in the morning ('cause there will be not much left and I'm not eating much as it is, anyway).
I'm not even pro-soda. I could understand if one says that soda can be bad for one's stomach or teeth (diet coke won't help here). I have a problem with the line of reasoning that soda contains calories and everyone needs less of them.
It just undermines the credibility of the dietary advice when the author assumes as a given that everybody should eat less.
Saying someones name doesn't actually help me. I have to write someones name down, either physically, type it into my phone, or write it in the air to remember it. And at that point I will most likely NEVER forget it again.
Friends I've had in high school I no longer have contact with that have strange names that are spelled a certain way I still remember how to spell them ...
Sitting next to another person while writing increases my writing productivity by at least 400%. In retrospect it took me way too long to break down and try this.
My shot at immortality costs me $120/year for membership in the Cryonics Institute and $170/year for $250K of 10-year term life insurance of which $50K goes to CI.
I lost 20 pounds on Seth Roberts's fixed-point diet (aka the "Shangri-La diet") and gained 10 of them back after the diet stopped working, but it's ridiculously easy and works better for some people than others.
An awful lot of the rationalists I know have moved to open relationships.
As long as you can learn how to suppress or ignore or never have jealousy, multiple relationships seem strictly better (= more fun) to me than monogamy.
In addition to suppressing and ignoring jealousy, another option is to learn how to acknowledge and deal with it. Just as fear is quite a natural thing and hinders people in accomplishing their goals, so can jealousy be a hindrance to happy relationships. Both can be successfully managed however.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. - Mark Twain
I believe the same can be said of jealousy. Also note that unchecked jealousy is not strictly a problem of polyamory; it wreaks havoc even in monogamous relationships.
This is not just from one example this among other things a series of documentaries, friends and my now 37 years.
Of course there are some people who can deal with it but chances are that they are not in love. That is at least my experience feel free to counter with experiences or knowledge about successful open relationships where the people are
In support of your point, a logical analysis that is relevant to why open relationships really don't work if you are talking about serious intimacy and not just screwing around casually:
> I lost 20 pounds on Seth Roberts's fixed-point diet (aka the "Shangri-La diet") and gained 10 of them back after the diet stopped working, but it's ridiculously easy and works better for some people than others.
I've heard that said about every Capital D Diet Plan. I have a hypothesis about weight loss which is that it's actually simpler than many people make it out to be. Your body basically has inputs and outputs when it comes to food. If you want to lose weight and/or trim up, you need to either decrease how much food goes in, or increase how much your body burns as energy or turns into new/replaced body cells. That's pretty much it. The overwhelming number of people with weight problems (assuming exceptions are folks with genetic disorders) are just people who are eating too much for what they're body is doing, or, doing too little with their body given the amount of food going in. The type/mix of food matters too, but that's also a no brainer -- don't eat junk, but if you do, eat as little as you can and spread it out with healthy/efficient stuff -- and if you do eat more junk, then you better work it off more to compensate.
I bake chicken wings and drumettes for a slow, but low-fuss dinner. Cover with salt and spices, rub in three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, bake on aluminum foil for 50 minutes at 190 C.
In those 50 minutes, I can clean my apartment, go for a walk, start the laundry, or whatever. The prep time for dinner takes me all of five minutes. They taste delicious and it's very easy to scale up (provided you have oven space) for visitors.
1) Own a business suit. It hacks other people, because whatever problem you are trying to get resolved does not happen to the sort of people who wear business suits. It also hacks yourself - you'd be amazed how hard it is to sound like an absent-minded twenty-something when you look like the CEO of a multinational. (Trust me.)
2) Writing letters - on paper, physical letters - is the most underrated professional skill there is. Every bureaucracy in the world is a machine to turn letters into things you want. When possible, hand-deliver the letter while wearing a business suit. (Not joking.)
3) You will end up like the people you associate with. Choose friends carefully. (Want to lose weight? Make thin friends. etc, etc)
4) Crock pots: cooking without all the sucky, time consuming parts.
2) Writing letters - on paper, physical letters - is the most underrated professional skill there is. Every bureaucracy in the world is a machine to turn letters into things you want. When possible, hand-deliver the letter while wearing a business suit. (Not joking.)
As intriguing as I find this idea, I couldn't help picture it a bit creepy to write and hand deliver(I can do one or the other). Then again, that's probably why it works. What context have you done that for?
I very rarely write but do have a handwritten journal which incidentally everyone in my life wants to read though I mostly figured it's to find what I've written about them.
Immigration, taxes, landlord issues (the tpoic was "compelling reasons why, despite being a foreigner, I would be a poor option to steal from"), resumes (+), etc.
+ I think resumes are for suckers but if you're going to write one you might as well be a sucker in a business suit.
Oh, you still need a resume but you don't start by delivering it. You start by talking to the person who is doing the hiring. the resume only comes out when they say "I'd like to hire you please send your resume to HR".
I can't emphasize this more. Do not hand out your resume like it's free. Value it. Don't give out more than what's needed. Create the "need to talk." Don't ever dump a resume into one of those corporate HR portals. It's a dead end. Make the HR guy work towards asking you for your resume. HR has to "earn" your resume -- 'cos it's tasty.
Agreed. Plus it's better to have some sort of public "surface area", presence, reputation, whatever, thats out there, and let people come to you. I'm very close to living a 0% resume life right now (not perfect, got a recruiter demanding one last week but they get off to a bad start with me when that happens, and I have lots of non-resume-needing opportunities on my plate to pick from). I think resumes are:
(1) retarded
(2) archaic relic of past age (like a horse & buggy in a world of interstate highways & helicopters)
(3) distorting
(4) low fidelity
(5) too confining
(6) too static/dead (not interactive, searchable and multimedia, like a web page)
(7) surpassed by the ability to have online presences and profiles
and (8) far far inferior to just showing your past work directly and relying on word-of-mouth recommendations and Internet findability, plus, having a personal conversation and telling someone what you can do for them, and doing it.
I once got a paying gig because when the client typed in a certain combination of keywords in Google, I came up as the #1 result, 1st page (!). You can't beat that. And that sort of recruiting/hiring/sales channel was just not possible even 20 years ago. Let's take advantage of it. Death to the past. Long live the present-becoming-the-future. :)
I agree completely on #2. Before college I has a lot of difficulty putting my thoughts on paper, and my writing style never earned me anything above a "C" in my writing classes.
Because I wrote letters in college often (asking for funds, mostly), it is much easier for me to form thoughts and get them across when speaking to someone.
Whenever possible, pass off laziness as efficiency.
Don't be afraid to take your own path. When I decided to switch research topics during grad school, no one was actually doing what I wanted to do, but I was able to convince a couple profs to work with me, successfully have them apply for an NSF grant on my topic, and form a brand new research group of questionable officialness.
I think this has been mentioned before. When purchasing stuff in (US) stores, you can generally swipe your card and enter your PIN before they are done ringing your items up. Makes things go a little faster and you feel like you're in the know.
As some of you might know, trains are very crowded here in India. I take a train to work. My simple hack is a marked position on the station where I stand when the train arrives in order to be the first one to grab the handle of one of the marked compartments that I always get in. After the people on the train alight, I can sneak in quickly. Using this hack, I am the first one to get inside the compartment 90% of time, no matter how large the crowd is.
Your brain is a very elastic thing. I've found over the years that I can reprogram (for want of a better word) my head and my personality.
Case in point - Up until 5 years ago I was petrified of needles. My mum used to have to inject herself twice a day due to diabetes until she moved to a pen when I was a teenager, so you think I'd be happy with needles. Oh no. I was scared out of my wits by them. Petrified that they'd hurt more than anything going in. Of course, when I had to have an injection for anything I'd look at it, tense and terrified so the experience would be horrific. I reprogrammed my mind to avoid tensing up, not to look at it, to focus on something else and to accept that this is going to hurt, but not as much as my mind thinks it would, and after a few injections I'm now able to have them without freaking out. A couple of months ago I developed pericarditis and had to have a catheter - normally this would freak me out, but I knew that along with drawing blood samples it had to happen and I had to let it happen so I dealt with it.
I also used to get very stressed out very easily and had a quick temper. I realised that I needed to do something about it as I could flare up and it would upset those near to me. I in effect forced my mind to realise that when I got angry, upset etc. over something that I could not change, all I was doing was upsetting those around me and raising my blood pressure over something that I had no control over. Getting angry at this point has absolutely no chance of any form of positive outcome. Thus, if getting angry doesn't help solve the problem, but not getting angry at least makes you feel better about the issue and better prepared to address the problem, it's much better not to get angry. It took several months of working on it and I do occasionally get wound up easily by some things but I'm definitely a much calmer person as a result.
I've done heaps of other things to my mind and personality in the hopes of making me a better person - becoming more sociable, more comfortable speaking in public, no longer wanting 'stuff' in my life, all with pretty good success.
That's what I do. I just dump all my socks in my drawer and pick two every morning. Sometimes they match, most times they don't. This has been the subject of much amusement at the office and with my family for many years now. I can't count the number of times I've had to ask people why they assume socks "should" be the same colour.
Amen to this one. I found a sock I like (Cole-Haan black pin-dot socks) and just load up once a year at the Nordstrom men's sale. The old ones get washed and donated (they fade slightly in a year, so don't mix-and-match).
Keep a reserve pair or two "fresh" (on the card stock) for those days when you forget to wash socks and you somehow run out.
186 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadGetting Things Done using Org mode (very simplified).
The Unschedule from The Now Habit.
Many tips from The Four Hour Work Week.
Make lists. Not too many. Mostly do.
I'm sure I'll think of more...
This way I don't waste my time, and I can quickly get back to what I was doing. I tend to spend a lot of time explaining concepts even to people that may know what I am talking about so that I don't have to be interrupted again.
I work better while in an almost empty room with no movement around me and no noises other than the music I am playing.
I tend to spend too much time multitasking so I have disabled all of the notification features on most of the apps I use (such as Mail.app, Adium, Twitter, and others) now they can't interrupt me with an badge stating how many messages I still have unread in my Inbox. It has given me a cleaner experience.
Socially I have started cutting out those people that only demand my time but don't provide me with anything. There is no reason why I should be spending my time writing a long reply when I know you are not going to read it or provide some sort of adequate answer to the questions I posed in an attempt to help you. This is in real life as well, phone calls and the like.
I felt like I had just grabbed a wrench or something and fixed a part of my life, but the wrench was Xcode.
Are you in effect creating a playlist with the "best" parts of songs.
Exactly what hardware are you using for this? "Classic" iPod with a custom firmware like Rockbox? Or iPhone/iPodTouch?
Screenshot http://cloudedbox.com/LoopTee.html
Figuring out how to skip boring classes and phys ed in high school (mostly) without getting caught. Ah, good times.
Bypassing uncooperative assistants on the phone in order to schedule meetings with their superiors (OK, not my proudest moments actually).
Faking attractiveness and social intelligence in order to get girls with all kinds of tricks, including infamous wing man maneuvers.
Wow... I better stop right there. Those are all kind of terrible :-(
Honestly, your post is more suspenseful than a cliche horror movie.
Escaping classes: we had these forms where we were supposed to enter our missed classes and then present them to the various teachers for signature at the end of the month. The weakness of this concept was that teachers had gotten so used to the forms that they didn't keep records of their own when people failed to show up. If you simply "forgot" to fill out and present the form 80% of the time, they would happily sign the other 20% without getting suspicious. Of course, after about a year of this, some of them were on to me, but since I always showed up for exams I guess we came to a silent agreement. One time, a teacher figured out what I was doing and asked me point blank; I admitted everything and to my surprise he said it was OK but I shouldn't tell anyone.
Skipping phys ed was harder. We had several sub-groups with different teachers. Turns out, when you left one sub-group for another, but failed to show up at the new one, nobody noticed because the new and the old teacher didn't ever speak to one another. This only worked because I didn't even show up once at the "new" teacher's lessons so she didn't know who I was. It sounds cool, but it almost got me expelled when school administration found out after two years. However, maybe I got lucky, they were simply incompetent, or they just decided to not care, because after the "formal investigation" was announced, I never heard from them again. Maybe they were ashamed that something like that could actually happen and since I never bragged about this exploit they just chose to ignore it.
Getting past assistants: this involves flat-out lying, which is why I don't do this shit anymore (nor do I need to at my current job, thank the gods). I believe assistants are in constant fear of screwing up. They're supposed to screen the calls and weed out people who just want to sell stuff to their boss, but at the same time they're terrified of false positives. So I basically implied that I knew their bosses. It worked almost every single time, the lies just had to be bold enough. Like, "oh, when we were playing Tennis the other week he said I should coordinate with you about getting an appointment in this month". Stuff like that.
Getting girls: leaving aside the classic wingman tactics at parties (most of which involve either distracting a girl's friends in order to isolate her and/or putting on a show to appear cooler), this one is actually more of a self-hack. It involves faking confidence and importance, and saying things that sound smart because they're prepared in advance.
Like I said, pretty stupid things, actually.
I highly doubt it would work 100% of the time; further, both lines are being manned by federal employees.
"Tragedy of the commons."
Like signing up to be a TA at the university -- now I know that I have to really master the course content.
Or telling people that I do/will do x and y.. so now I have to do x and y or else I'm a hypocrite and that sure would be bad. I tell my friends that I get out of bed by counting down out loud from 5..0, and that I ALWAYS get out of bed at 0. And I've convinced myself that I'm a hypocrite or fool of some sort if I don't follow through, just because i told people.
Also made a fun screen scraper last week for a course at the University that filled up with only Seniors and Juniors(has at least 100 students trying to get in). Crontabs to run my script which logs me into the course website and checks the spot availability of the class(and then alerts me if it's open). That's fun because only me and the other CS kids could possibly do this.
Surrender completely, be kind, considerate and honest. Haven't gotten a ticket in nine years. More, if you're curious about the step-by-step:
http://blog.danilocampos.com/2010/10/23/how-to-get-away-with...
Having a notebook:
A notebook large enough to comfortably dump your thoughts into but small enough to be always near your keyboard is awesome. The notebook helps with procrastination, especially when avoiding some gnarly bit of code you don't know how to write. I just start describing the problem and how I might solve it.
After awhile, I have:
- An idea of what I need to look up
- A basic list of tasks
- A clearer understanding of what I need to do
Thanks to them, I've never gotten a ticket while inside my own district.
While I have gotten tickets outside my district, I have had violations ignored or reduced drastically merely for coming across as a "good guy".
The police aren't there to mess up your day unless one of you is in a bad mood. You can't control his mood, but don't make your mood the problem.
----
That said, if you're looking at something worse than a traffic violation--invoke every possible right that you can.
Definitely true – I'm assuming we're talking speeding tickets or missed road sign of some sort. If you're transporting drugs or weapons, or driving under the influence, that's a whole other deal.
Hack:
Don't transport anything illegal, including an inebriated driver.
1. Get pulled over for speeding.
2. Have your windows rolled down when the officer walks up to your car, hands on the wheel, &c.
3. Preemptively, "Hi, officer. I know I was speeding. I'm sorry, but if I don't get home and go to the bathroom right now, I'm going to need a new pair of pants." Delivery matters, obviously, but it's not hard.
4. Get sent on my merry way.
100% success rate, for a far smaller sample size than I should have, given how I tend to drive.
That said, danilocampos' advice holds. In the one instance where I was caught speeding egregiously, playing the situation as described got my ticket reduced below the magic "10 MPH over" threshold, where the violation is typically also reported to your insurance carrier, leaving aside the reduction in ticket cost.
Moreover, that was after he had to chase me for almost half a mile. His car was an unmarked Mustang, with no siren and recessed flashers, so I simply didn't see him until he pulled in behind me and blocked me into my parking spot at the office.
He was obviously expecting a worst-case scenario after a chase like that (hand on his sidearm as he approached my car, &c). My courtesy and honesty helped defray would could've otherwise been a deep pile of suck.
(I also don't speed much on that road any more. Go figure.)
The real hack that I do though is every morning I take a post-it note and write down 3 things that I will finish that day. Then I stick it to my monitor and do the things. After that, I relax and play Starcraft 2 or work on personal projects.
Before I started using the post-it note, I would have a day or two where I was really productive, followed by several days of lackluster productivity. Now, by committing to fewer items per day but actually accomplishing them all, I'm way more productive overall, my clients are happier, and I'm actually making progress on my personal projects.
The major problem I have with it is convincing myself it's OK to stop if I finish my three tasks early.
For me, this means that I run the same GTD/Pomodoro routine day in and day out using Remember the Milk. And I won't evaluate alternatives until I can't help but.
Something similar for revolving doors. Most venues that have revolving doors also have normal doors for wheelchairs, deliveries, or whatever. Stick a large group of people together, and they start clumping up trying to go through the revolver, instead of just going through the other doors.
Being aware of this crowd behavior is a great way to bypass lines, avoid frustration, and beat the crowd.
There was a main entrance gate at my old high school. There was four sets of double door that opened out, that allowed students into the campus. These doors are damn heavy and one night I was cruising with my friend and I told him, I got an idea. I refused to answer any of his inquiries.
We arrived at the high school, I climbed up onto the top of the gate. On each door was the little hydraulic system to stop the doors from slamming shut ( know what I'm sayin?) These hydraulic arms were just little planks of metal. I pushed them down with my foot. This created tension when the door closed on the two arms. Instead of sliding freely(and the door closing), the arms rub and create enough friction to hold the door open.
Now instead of the doors swinging close, they remain open daily, until they are closed for the night. Every day I would walk through them, and see every other student walking through my simple little hack that got the doors to stay open all day.
tl;dr: Hacked some doors at my old high school so they would stay open instead of closing.
Edit: My logic is: I used the doors... four times a day average. Took three seconds to open and walk through vs one second to just walk through. So two seconds to open. About 180 days of school times four years.
180x4x2/60= 24 minutes
While not substantial, I just saved a person 24 minutes of their life.
You actually saved 24 minutes times, say, 3000 students, which is 24*3000/60/24 = 50 human days saved over the span of four years. Not to mention, this hack may well have lived on since you've graduated, so that's many more days of savings. Nice.
You mentioned four sets of double doors, which also indicates the designer knew the requirement for positive closure would be a flow issue and added extra doors. Had there not been a really good reason for having the doors be closed they probably wouldn't have planned for the extra doors.
I know you believe your "hack" was innocent enough, but essentially you vandalized a system someone carefully thought out to save yourself 24 minutes over 4 years.
I don't know the architecture of your high school or the reasoning behind the positive closure doors, but I hope to god they were not part of a firewall (walls and closed doors designed to prevent fire from spreading through a building faster than it can be safely evacuated).
The other morning I drove up to the bank's drive-thru. There are two lanes of teller+ATMs, but for some reason this morning the second lane had a red X over the lane, meaning there was not a teller manning the manual transaction tube.
But the ATM was still working, the green light was on. But guess what? The other 5 cars saw the X and decided to queue for the other ATM. I swooped right up to the free machine, got my cash, and left. I would have waited 20 minutes in the other line.
Remember, though, that time is your precious resource. You'll never, ever get it back. All life hacks must either extend your time, shorten tasks, or make your time more meaningful.
Here are a few things that came to mind:
Productivity:
* Make a check list. Once you start, you won't be able to believe that you lived life without one. Can't overstate this one.
* I wrote a script that takes screenshots every half minute and lets me see what I've been doing. Huge time-saver. Check-lists also help.
Mental/Spiritual/Creative Well-being:
* Read an actual book that's actually not on a screen. Don't do anything else concurrently.
* Keep short, creative side-projects/weekend projects that you can be excited about. It'll keep your creative juices flowing.
* If you're in a rut, start saying "yes" to things more. It's too easy to stay in.
Fitness:
* Cold shower in the morning, and/or swimming in cold water. A few minutes of this and you'll feel like you ran 10 miles.
* If you're going to enjoy soda or something bad for you, enjoy it in small sips.
* F.lux for your eyes.
* Eat when you're hungry or low on energy. Don't eat when you're not hungry or not low on energy.
Social interaction:
* "Flirt" with everybody. Men and women. Don't overdo it or be weird about it, but the qualities that are successful in flirting tend to be endearing.
* Pay attention to people. "Being there" mentally can be hard, especially when you're tired or your company is tiring, but you've got to try.
* Low self-confidence is a road to all bad things. You're better than that.
* "I like your shirt/watch/shoes/bag" and get ready to hear a story.
* If you can use someone's name, use it. If you can't (and I forget names _all the time_) see if you can introduce a nearby friend. ->* Need help remembering names? Apparently this is an old sales trick (I haven't tried it but it's brilliant): index names in your phone book by category, as you may know WHERE you know a person from but may not be able to remember their name. So for a guy you know from college and whose number you have but you can't remember his name, you can go through your "College" contacts to find "College Ted." Hopefully the name resonates when you see it; I haven't tried this yet.
Time for sleep, I think, but hope these are helpful to someone...
while true; do screencapture `date '+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%I'`.png; sleep 30; done
Quit drinking so much soda, and switch to diet when you do. (I lost a ton of weight like this. Seriously, a bottle of Coke is over 200 calories. If you drink multiple sodas a day, you can cut out the caloric equivalent of a Big Mac and fries without altering what you eat at all.)
Buy as many monitors as you can fit on your desk. Consider a bigger desk.
Just figure out 2-3 ways to repeat the person's name in conversation and the name will stick to the face.
Saturday is my cheat day where I'm allowed to eat everything I want. I ate a pizza and drank a bottle of soda. The pizza was great, but the soda was way too sweet for me. I literary had to force myself to drink the rest (I don't know why I felt I had to empty it). Today I woke up feeling tired the same way I used to feel before I started eating/drinking better and with a huge pimple in my forehead.
Then we should be talking about that, not cutting calories and losing weight. I think I could use more energy, feeling of well being and skin quality. But I suspect that if I just throw away carbohydrates from my ration, I won't be able to get up in the morning ('cause there will be not much left and I'm not eating much as it is, anyway).
I'm not even pro-soda. I could understand if one says that soda can be bad for one's stomach or teeth (diet coke won't help here). I have a problem with the line of reasoning that soda contains calories and everyone needs less of them.
It just undermines the credibility of the dietary advice when the author assumes as a given that everybody should eat less.
Friends I've had in high school I no longer have contact with that have strange names that are spelled a certain way I still remember how to spell them ...
My shot at immortality costs me $120/year for membership in the Cryonics Institute and $170/year for $250K of 10-year term life insurance of which $50K goes to CI.
I lost 20 pounds on Seth Roberts's fixed-point diet (aka the "Shangri-La diet") and gained 10 of them back after the diet stopped working, but it's ridiculously easy and works better for some people than others.
An awful lot of the rationalists I know have moved to open relationships.
Why?
If not, I apologize in advance for my insanity. ;)
This is not just from one example this among other things a series of documentaries, friends and my now 37 years.
Of course there are some people who can deal with it but chances are that they are not in love. That is at least my experience feel free to counter with experiences or knowledge about successful open relationships where the people are
I know of none and I know quite a few people who did it, saw a couple of documentaries about it.
I am more than happy to be proven wrong but as far as I am concerned my point still stands and is fairly rational.
If you are in love, open relationships ain't what it's all pumped up to be.
http://www.novemberwest.com/blog/?p=5
Disclaimer: I wrote it. Yes, it's my site. Whatever.
There is a reason why the experimentation with that kind of relationships have been on a decline since it's peak in the sixties/seventies.
We are talking about being in love not just being fuck buddies.
I've heard that said about every Capital D Diet Plan. I have a hypothesis about weight loss which is that it's actually simpler than many people make it out to be. Your body basically has inputs and outputs when it comes to food. If you want to lose weight and/or trim up, you need to either decrease how much food goes in, or increase how much your body burns as energy or turns into new/replaced body cells. That's pretty much it. The overwhelming number of people with weight problems (assuming exceptions are folks with genetic disorders) are just people who are eating too much for what they're body is doing, or, doing too little with their body given the amount of food going in. The type/mix of food matters too, but that's also a no brainer -- don't eat junk, but if you do, eat as little as you can and spread it out with healthy/efficient stuff -- and if you do eat more junk, then you better work it off more to compensate.
Not sure how that saves time, unless you're so coordinated that you can wash your body with one hand while you're brushing your teeth with the other.
Also, it would seem to waste a bit of water.
Yes, it probably is using more water but I waste that water anyway.
In those 50 minutes, I can clean my apartment, go for a walk, start the laundry, or whatever. The prep time for dinner takes me all of five minutes. They taste delicious and it's very easy to scale up (provided you have oven space) for visitors.
"The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot." - Michael Althsuler
"The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves." - Steven Covey
2) Writing letters - on paper, physical letters - is the most underrated professional skill there is. Every bureaucracy in the world is a machine to turn letters into things you want. When possible, hand-deliver the letter while wearing a business suit. (Not joking.)
3) You will end up like the people you associate with. Choose friends carefully. (Want to lose weight? Make thin friends. etc, etc)
4) Crock pots: cooking without all the sucky, time consuming parts.
As intriguing as I find this idea, I couldn't help picture it a bit creepy to write and hand deliver(I can do one or the other). Then again, that's probably why it works. What context have you done that for?
I very rarely write but do have a handwritten journal which incidentally everyone in my life wants to read though I mostly figured it's to find what I've written about them.
+ I think resumes are for suckers but if you're going to write one you might as well be a sucker in a business suit.
(1) retarded
(2) archaic relic of past age (like a horse & buggy in a world of interstate highways & helicopters)
(3) distorting
(4) low fidelity
(5) too confining
(6) too static/dead (not interactive, searchable and multimedia, like a web page)
(7) surpassed by the ability to have online presences and profiles
and (8) far far inferior to just showing your past work directly and relying on word-of-mouth recommendations and Internet findability, plus, having a personal conversation and telling someone what you can do for them, and doing it.
I once got a paying gig because when the client typed in a certain combination of keywords in Google, I came up as the #1 result, 1st page (!). You can't beat that. And that sort of recruiting/hiring/sales channel was just not possible even 20 years ago. Let's take advantage of it. Death to the past. Long live the present-becoming-the-future. :)
Don't be afraid to take your own path. When I decided to switch research topics during grad school, no one was actually doing what I wanted to do, but I was able to convince a couple profs to work with me, successfully have them apply for an NSF grant on my topic, and form a brand new research group of questionable officialness.
I think this has been mentioned before. When purchasing stuff in (US) stores, you can generally swipe your card and enter your PIN before they are done ringing your items up. Makes things go a little faster and you feel like you're in the know.
Case in point - Up until 5 years ago I was petrified of needles. My mum used to have to inject herself twice a day due to diabetes until she moved to a pen when I was a teenager, so you think I'd be happy with needles. Oh no. I was scared out of my wits by them. Petrified that they'd hurt more than anything going in. Of course, when I had to have an injection for anything I'd look at it, tense and terrified so the experience would be horrific. I reprogrammed my mind to avoid tensing up, not to look at it, to focus on something else and to accept that this is going to hurt, but not as much as my mind thinks it would, and after a few injections I'm now able to have them without freaking out. A couple of months ago I developed pericarditis and had to have a catheter - normally this would freak me out, but I knew that along with drawing blood samples it had to happen and I had to let it happen so I dealt with it.
I also used to get very stressed out very easily and had a quick temper. I realised that I needed to do something about it as I could flare up and it would upset those near to me. I in effect forced my mind to realise that when I got angry, upset etc. over something that I could not change, all I was doing was upsetting those around me and raising my blood pressure over something that I had no control over. Getting angry at this point has absolutely no chance of any form of positive outcome. Thus, if getting angry doesn't help solve the problem, but not getting angry at least makes you feel better about the issue and better prepared to address the problem, it's much better not to get angry. It took several months of working on it and I do occasionally get wound up easily by some things but I'm definitely a much calmer person as a result.
I've done heaps of other things to my mind and personality in the hopes of making me a better person - becoming more sociable, more comfortable speaking in public, no longer wanting 'stuff' in my life, all with pretty good success.
I ditched them all and purchased 20 pairs of the same socks. I never pair them up, but simply dump them in the drawer after washing.
This way I don't have to pair them up and I never have to quest for "the lost sock(tm)".
Keep a reserve pair or two "fresh" (on the card stock) for those days when you forget to wash socks and you somehow run out.