Life Hacks

Hacks of highly effective people

Danny O'Brien gave a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference called Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks. [Hey, good title :)! Yes, it's just a coincidence.] You can read Cory Doctorow's notes from the talk here.

Danny O'Brien interviewed several well-known geeks to find out how they manage to be so prolific and keep their lives in order. Some interesting ideas from the responses:

• Instead of complicated apps like Outlook, most used simple text files for their to do lists.

  It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10 seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the simplest interface we can imagine.

• Use email/RSS/private blog entries to keep track of things. These can be automated; i.e. configuring a machine to automatically send an email when the hard drive is almost full, or scraping a web page and generating your own RSS feed to keep track of information.
• Everyone had written scripts to automate tasks and organize files.

  Geeks write scripts to take apart dull, repetitive tasks. They'll spend 10h writing a script that will save 11h -- because writing scripts is interesting and doing dull stuff isn't.

By far, the idea I found most interesting was the importance of sharing ideas.

Edd Dumbill: Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. Don't hoard them. I blog them or otherwise tell people.
This is a way to look organized, "That guy has lots of ideas, what a genius."
You only have to be right once -- people google for some idea and find your ramble about it and are impressed.
Making stuff public is like having your parents come to stay -- you clean everything up.

The people whose ideas become known are the ones who make their ideas public!

Posted by sarah at March 24, 2004 03:35 PM in Ideas