Life Hacking
February 13, 2008 – 7:07 pm Nexium Without Prescription Cymbalta No Prescription Aricept For Sale Phentrimine Generic Buy Avapro Online Coumadin Without Prescription Zyban No Prescription Nizoral For Sale Prozac Generic Buy Aldactone OnlineYes, you guessed it! I’m interested in life hacking. Just thought I’d let you know in case the name of this blog wasn’t a dead give away (ed: this domain was originally intended for a life hacking app). I’m a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which was also the inspiration of the great life hacker website 43folders.com.
Anyway, I recently added some life hacker blogs to my RSS reader and just read this post. It doesn’t have much that I haven’t heard before, but its always good to periodically review these types of tips to remind yourself, and think, “Oh, yeah, I should really get around to trying that!”
A few things on this list that jumped out at me:
Brainstorming: The act of generating dozens of ideas without editing or censoring yourself. Lots of people use mindmaps for this: stick the thing you want to think about in the middle (a problem you need to solve, a theme you want to write about, etc.) and start writing whatever you think of. Build off of each of the sub-topics, and each of their sub-topics. Don’t worry about whether the ideas are any good or not — you don’t have to follow through on them, just get them out of your head. After a while, you’ll start surprising yourself with some really creative concepts.
I censure the hell of out my brainstorming. This is a habit I really, really need to get rid of. I’ll discard good ideas up front because of some messy detail. It would be better to consider everything upfront. Then I can look at all the options and say, “Well, this one isn’t perfect because it had this problem, but thats not so bad, we can probably solve it.”
10+2*5: Work in short spurts of 10 minutes, interrupted by 2 minute breaks. Use a timer. Do this 5 times an hour to stay on target without over-taxing your physical and mental resources. Spend those 2 minutes getting a drink, going to the bathroom, or staring out a window.
Dude! This is an awesome idea and one that I’ve never heard of before. As soon as I can track down a good timer, I’ll give this one a shot and report back.