You could visit a life coach or hire a therapist, but in recent years young hipsters have begun following a new self-help trend: life hacking. Embraced in the blogosphere, the term describes little tricks and shortcuts that make work easier and life more pleasurable. Here’s some advice direct from the hipster’s mouth.
Lose the BlackBerry
Life-hacking devotee Tatsuya Nakagawa, president and CEO of Atomica Creative Group Ltd., ditched his BlackBerry after he failed to stick to his own ground rules. “I set a policy: on the weekends I’m not going to have it on me, and in meetings it’s turned off.” That didn’t last long. When Nakagawa, a regular contributor to lifehack.org, found himself checking emails from behind the wheel of his car, he decided it was time to toss the tech toy. “I found I was wasting more time than actually saving time,” he comments. Today he uses a simple paper system to keep track of things and, he says, “My pocket’s not buzzing all the time.”
Read less, learn more
Who has the hours to read this week’s must-read book espousing the latest business, management or economics theory? If you want the info without the time commitment, take a tip from Mike Addams, senior lender with mortgage lender Get Acceptance Corp. A dedicated life hacker, Addams took out a membership with Soundview Executive Book Summaries. “You get the Coles Notes version of any business book,” he explains. “I really don’t want to spend the time to read a whole book to get that same information. If I like it, then I go out and actually buy the book.”
Stop checking email
Committed life hackers will point out that checking your email constantly throughout the day means you’re using it as a distraction rather than as a task to be managed. Nakagawa suggests setting aside time to check your inbox twice a day and letting everyone know that’s how you operate. “When you’re in email mode you can go through a lot,” he notes. “People think email is something that comes at them that they try and fend off, instead of having a strategy behind it.”
Time yourself
One of the most useful tools in Addams’s life-hacking arsenal is a simple timer, which he uses as a motivator and a planning device. “Say you have a bunch of filing to do, but it seems overwhelming to do four hours in one go. If you say, look, I’ll do five minutes a day, you can manage that. You set the timer, do your work, stop, and you know you’re going to do the rest of it tomorrow.”
Delegate
Time is money, and if you’re spending yours taking care of niggling tasks when you could be doing something that really pays, consider hiring outside help. Addams has an assistant come to his house twice a week to handle various chores such as paying his bills and inputting business cards and contacts into his Outlook database. “It’s much more worth it to me to free up my night,” he says. “While she is at my place, I can go out for drinks with associates who I wouldn’t have time to go meet.”