Jeffrey C. Long

Today, I am at Moxie Java in Twin Falls, studying and writing. As I arrived, I hung my leather coat on the back of a chair, and promptly worried that I would forget it. It’s not horribly cold outside, so I could feasibly walk out, get into my car, and never remember that I brought a coat. Thinking for a moment, it hit me to put my car keys in my pocket. That way I wouldn’t be capable of leaving without my coat.

This is what’s called a lifehack. A trick to better handle the perplexities of our lives.

Another one, is from a friend. Many months ago, I was at a banquet and I needed to remember something but didn’t have pencil and paper. My friend told me to associate what I needed to remember with an object. He handed me a sugar packet and said that whenever I felt the packet in my pocket, I’d remember that thing. It worked.

I need hacks. And lots of them. As I’ve continued to wade through Getting Things Done, I’ve discovered that I keep my mind like a disorganized closet. It is so full of stuff, that I can never find something when I need it. I’ve been learning to clean it out by doing a brain dump of everything that’s on my mind and to find hacks like these to take the load off of the stuff that I have to keep in my mind.

If you’d like to learn more about Lifehacks, the following links will do you good.

Danny O’briens Notcon conference video talking about Life hacks

43folders.com Where I first discovered the Lifehacks movement and Getting Things Done

Lifehacker.com

Interview with Danny O’Brien, father of “life hacks”

Wikipedia entry for Lifehacks

del.icio.us tags for lifehacks (I subscribe to the RSS feed for this)

What tricks do you use to get through this information saturated world we live in?

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