Lifehacking: Organizing Your Life

I recently stumbled upon several blogs that are devoted to a single topic – organizing your life. The buzzword for this in the blogosphere is “lifehacking.” It originated as a programmers’ term, but has recently broadened its scope to include all sorts of productivity areas.

Technology is supposed to make our lives more productive. But there are several problems that continue to elude the masses:

  • Software applications have a learning curve, and most interfaces aren’t intuitive or discoverable enough for the average user.
  • Web applications and sites suffer from this same usability issue.
  • Our lives are encompassed by massive amounts of data (both digital, paper and other). Working with data requires creating workflows, and modern technology sometimes convolves the workflow process.

The following blogs have numerous tips, tricks, hints and software downloads to make our lives more productive. These are mainly useful for people who use technology (especially the Internet) every day and want to organize their data and create productive workflows. That pretty much applies to everyone I know (a few luddites excepting).

Lifehack.org (feed)
Lifehacker.com (feed)
43folders.com (feed)

A few posts I’ve discovered through these services that are uber-useful:
7 tips of handling your Emails without feeling overwhelmed
Merlin’s top 5 super-obvious, “no-duh” ways to immediately improve your life
RSS tips (2) How not to go mad

And of course, a general tip I always recommend is to go grab a copy of Mozilla Firefox. Learn how to use the tab feature (I also understand that Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 is about to be released to the masses, and finally has tabbed browsing, but I can’t very well recommend the insecure Internet Explorer, now can I?). Can’t install it on your work computer? No problem – just use Mozilla Firefox – Portable Edition. No installation necessary.

Since I’m a designer and I have special interest in user interfaces, the lifehack topic comes naturally to me. So, I’m going to start posting more lifehacking productivity tips (most especially relating to Google and other web applications). It really fits with the tagline I set for this blog when I started it – “Where technology and real life can meet and be friendly.”

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By Philip Cain

Ninja Master of the Series of Tubes, musician, audio engineer and geek. More about Philip...