Serendipity35

Work smarter, not harder. It's a phrase I've heard over the years. I saw it on a site I came across called hackcollege.com which is a site that its describes itself this way:

Lectures are boring and inefficient. Long hours spent studying hand-written notes is very 1994. Anyone graduating today needs to know not how to operate a computer, but when. The fault is both with the students and the teachers. HackCollege is changing education. HackCollege is educating the students of the world about effective, open source software, putting techno-political arguments in everyday language, and creating a cult of "Students 2.0." If we can change the way 1 percent of college students and faculty in the world view education and technology, we've done our job.

Most of us think of "hacking" as as computer term and probably as something negative. ("They hacked into the computer system and launched the missiles!") There are actually lots of different hacks out there - many tech-oriented, but not all. (A hack is also a row of stacked green [unfired] bricks protected from the rain by a covering of straw, slates or special wooden hack covers, the sides protected by mats or planks. You learn something every time you read Serendipity35.)

The term life hack originally referred to productivity tricks that programmers devised to organize their data. Those life hacks were often quick and dirty (shell scripts and other command line utilities that filtered, munged and processed data streams like email and RSS feeds - things Tim cares about more than me).

The term spread as a meme and now anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.

Even though I have given up on new year resolutions, I thought I might just look online for where lifehacking is today. Hackcollege is for students but teachers and staff need help just as much as students.

There is, of course, a site called Lifehacker. I think it's odd that the lifehacker.com website is so busy looking that I had to read some haiku to clear my mind. Being that I'm still old school on many things, I started looking at Amazon.

So here are some lifehacking book recommendations.

Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better by Gina Trapani, who is the editor and creator of Lifehacker and this is her second book about managing your digital life better.  (see bottom)

Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day  is the first book by Trapani and it has ways to keeps things simple and offers 88 hacks for your computer life.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferris. A major hack of your life.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. A "classic" He came up with "getting things done"(GTD) methodology which actually has had an impact on personal productivity.

From Gina Trapani:

The second edition of the Lifehacker book, Upgrade Your Life, is a compilation of the best 116 hacks and downloads from Lifehacker's archives. This dead tree version of the web site transforms dozens of blog posts into comprehensive, edited tutorials, which will be familiar to longtime readers. While an official electronic version of Upgrade Your Life isn't available, today I've pulled together links to all the past posts that informed each book chapter to give you a one-stop preview of what's inside that cover. Consider this post the unedited web version of the book. After the jump, get a ginormous roundup of all the posts that created Upgrade Your Life by chapter. And shhhh, don't tell my book publisher I'm giving this all away.

If this is all just too overwhelming for you, start with this lifehack.org piece on "How To Procrastinate."