
Down with lifehacking - andreipop
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/07/lifehacking_is_just_another_way_to_make_us_work_more.html
======
danso
Oh boy, another vapid commentary by Evgeny Morozov, following the tried and
true formula of:

1\. Pick topic close to the heart of techies 2\. Deride the worst/most
fanatical examples of said topic in practice 3\. Make non-techies feel safe
and smug that techie people are just mindless electric sheep

Because the idea that there's a way to streamline your life's mundane tasks so
that you can do something other than watch cat videos is just beyond
imagination. Nope, people obsessed with efficency are automatons who would
only use that free time to just work harder and/or view cat videos.

This essay is even more nonsensical than his usual. It's like he ran out of
wild anecdotes abo life hacking and had to find other words to which "hacking"
has been appended.

~~~
lvs
I think it's wrong to bifurcate the audience into technie and non-techie, as
if the only people who don't buy into personal optimizer narcissism are
decidedly untechnical. You live in a little bubble if you think that's the
case.

~~~
danso
No doubt. Don't get me wrong, there's obviously excesses when it comes to life
hacking, or entrepernurialism, or anything, and it's fine to pushback with
reasoned arguments. However, IMO, Morozov's contrarianism leaves little room
for a healthy spectrum, and devolves quickly into "look at those tech freaks!"

------
jgrahamc
"Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your
time—so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?"

Sure, yes. But there's nothing new about this and it really doesn't have
anything to do with lifehacking or Silicon Valley.

Speaking from the lofty position of having letter of the month in Time
Management Magazine in the early 1990s I can tell you that people have been
enthusiastic about this kind of thing forever! And some people will be so
enthusiastic that they'll totally overdo it and lose the benefit.

~~~
Millennium
He does have a point, though. Lifehacking was supposed to be a means to an
end: a way to get more time to oneself by finding more effective ways to deal
with the daily chores and other "maintenance" tasks. But for far too many, it
has become an end and itself: the time gained back from lifehacks gets
reinvested into LIFEHACK MOAR, and we become slaves to routine in the very way
we were trying to escape. That wasn't the point.

What lifehacks are awesome for, though, is getting your life straightened out.
If you're like a lot of geeks, you can probably identify one or two things
that you've let fall by the wayside in the quest for more time that you really
shouldn't have. But now, you're having more trouble Just Doing Them back into
your life. Lifehacks present an alternate approach to these tasks: a way to do
them that breaks the psychological associations that led you to stop doing
them in the first place. That can be a very powerful thing. So next time you
decide to tackle that task, try a lifehacked approach. It really helps.

~~~
dwc
Yes, many things do become ends unto themselves. This is why I read only the
occasional _life hack_ , or _life pro tip_. It's become a fetish. It's less
about optimizing your life than being able to say that you're a lifehacker.
The same thing largely applies to the so-called "maker" culture.

~~~
fourstar
Thanks for subscribing/reading Life Pro Tips. =)

------
enraged_camel
One thing I remember from watching the Inbox Zero presentation [1] by Merlin
Mann a couple of years ago was the analogy he used involving a burger joint.

Paraphrasing, he said that lifehacking is similar to optimizing the process of
taking orders and organizing them, but at some point those orders actually
need to be fulfilled. Otherwise you'll end up with a lot of angry customers,
who don't care about what awesome optimizations you're doing behind the
scenes!

This is not to say that lifehacking is useless. Rather, the emphasis is that
ultimately, you have to get things done.

[1][http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk)

------
eksith
How to "life hack":

    
    
      1) Obtain organizer.
      2) Use it.
    

I think some of us like to experience the joy of inefficiency to some degree
provided it doesn't hinder too much of productivity.

"within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers" This breaks
my heart so much. Sleeping, the thing I'm not able to do very well in the
first place, is one of the most sacred activities I can engage in. The last
thing I need is to make it shorter (albeit allegedly more efficient).

Edit: Er... brain fart grammar. I need more Lifehacking!

~~~
kiba
_" within the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers" This
breaks my heart so much. Sleeping, the thing I'm not able to do very well in
the first place, is one of the most sacred activities I can engage in. The
last thing I need is to make it shorter (albeit allegedly more efficient)._

I thought the conventional wisdom on Hacker News is that you should sleep
well, exercise, eat right, and have a good balance of activities, even if you
are a startup founder.

~~~
potatolicious
This isn't limited to HN, but I feel like the startup scene is somewhat of a
"do as I say, not as I do" phenomenon. People will nod in enthusiastic
agreement about the need to work sustainably, be balanced, eat well, sleep
enough, etc.

And then pull an all nighter filled with Monster and Red Bull.

There's a bit of a dissonance in the community. On the one hand we agree with
all of this talk about balance, on the other hand the culture is still very
much an overgrown frathouse. We're touting the merits of working smarter while
at the same time playing up the "code through the night!" hackathons.

We'll find our way out of it eventually.

~~~
francoisdevlin
Take a moment to compare this with the age distribution of HN, and you'll
start to put it all together.

------
knowtheory
For someone who has spent a great deal of time decrying how facile and shallow
TED has become, Evgeny Morozov has really doubled down contrarianism for
contrarianism's sake without contending with irony therein.

He styles himself as a truth teller to some sort of "techno-elite", but he's
really just a troll with nothing interesting to say.

~~~
mcguire
Oh, I don't know. It's kind of entertaining to take one crazy person
("Consumed within three hours of getting under the sheets, meals of at least
800 milligrams of cholesterol ... and 40 grams of protein produced
dramatically faster time-to-sleep scores....") and rub them up against
another, contrasting, crazy person ("within the globalist neoliberal paradigm,
sleeping is for losers").

------
orofino
To me this article 1)says very little 2) conflates 'lifehacking' and
'lifestyle design'

Lifehacking to me has always been about little things you do to reduce
friction and mundanity in your day to day. Tim Ferris promotes something else
entirely which advocates an entirely different lifestyle, fueled by passive
income, allowing you to focus on What You Want™.

[Sorry for the buzzword bingo above, I felt I needed to embrace it to
adequately articulate the thoughts.]

~~~
k-mcgrady
Lifestyle design incorporates life hacking. You can't have lifestyle design
without life hacking.

------
theorique
How one-sided. Anything worthy can be done to excess, but that line is drawn
by the individual.

Take running as an example - the couch potato thinks the weekend 5K duffers
are "running to excess"; the 5K duffers think the person training for a
marathon is "running to excess"; the marathon trainers think the ultra-runners
are "running to excess"; the ultra-runners think the 72-hour endurance runners
are "running to excess".

As long as a person's lifehacking "system" is contributing to their well
being, and serving them, who's to say it's wrong? If someone steps back and
says, "ok, I'm working this system too much and I want to change it", then
that's fine too.

Really, people - live and let live - it's not that hard.

~~~
robbles
I agree, but I also think this argument goes both ways.

The 5K runners think the couch potatoes should run more, the marathon trainers
think the 5K runners should run more, etc. In a similar fashion, the
"inefficient" are bombarded with lifehacking advice from the likes of Tim
Ferriss and David Allen.

I think if there's one good takeaway from this article, it's that the
lifehackers should "live and let live" as well. Not everyone needs or wants to
optimize their life.

~~~
theorique
I agree with that too. People don't need to evangelize their latest
productivity system.

~~~
tankbot
I'm not sure. I'll agree that it can be irritating, but I think sometimes
people actually do need to evangelize their latest $WHATEVER in order to help
motivate themselves and stay focused. Whether or not this is a sign of
un/healthy activity could also be an interesting debate.

~~~
theorique
Yes, generally it's more about the evangelizer rather than their target (see:
vegan, Christian, vi-user, etc)

~~~
tankbot
Haha! Wait... That was funny until the part about vi.

Vim is the best editor ever and you should use it! Your editor is bad and you
should feel bad!

------
jonmc12
“Business destroys creativity, self-knowledge, emotional well-being, your
ability to be social,” - does not seem to reconcile the partition of mental
activity presented in "The Role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of
expert performance" (summary:
[http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-
the...](http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the-role-of-
deliberate-practice-in-the)) - notably, "The importance of rest" has its own
section.

Productivity tools are not destructive, they are just useful in context and
inefficient when mis-applied - just like any other tool.

~~~
andrewthesmart
What I say in the book is "chronic busyness destroys creativity, self-
knowledge, emotional well-being, your ability to be social" and that I would
argue is true. Deliberate practice to me means intense focus on one specific
activity for a long period, not trying to juggle long to do lists or
multitasking. Crucially, deliberate practice also I would argue an internally
imposed task - in that the practitioner chooses to focus on it - rather than
switching among hundreds of tasks a day on an externally imposed schedule.
What I argue against in the book is trying to master "busyness" \- because
quite simply our brains are not designed to be busy and when they are busy the
amazing things our brains can do are suppressed. That's my hypothesis - I
think it's testable.

~~~
anigbrowl
I look forward to reading it - I was also greatly amused by your text
adventure ;-)

------
tomasien
"You should spend time doing nothing" is a life hack. Life hacks aren't all
about doing more more efficiently, what do you think the title "The 4 Hour
Work Week" denotes? MORE work?

(On the record - not a fan of the 4HWW)

~~~
anigbrowl
It's all about the subtitle '...and join the new rich.'

------
ChikkaChiChi
Lifehacking is when someone thinks of the idea to use a paper binder to keep
your cords tidy.

I hereby propose a vote on calling what TFA is talking about as either:

A) Todo Voodoo B) Efficiency Masturbation

Feel free to use either free of charge. I just open sourced them and now
intend to have Tim Ferriss write a book about how you can do all this in only
four hours a week!

------
jff
I thought the time saved by lifehacks was usually devoted to writing blog
posts about how you've been doing X for 3 days now and it's amazing.

~~~
logn
No, it's so you can take the Google ad profits from your blog with that
article to work less hours at work which you devote to creating an AI robot to
write more lifehacking articles until the circle of life is complete and you
have time to catch up on all that missed sleep.

------
650REDHAIR
Lifehacking --> Quantified self

~~~
norswap
Care to expand? Do you think that quantifying your life actually has some
benefits? I was never totally sold on that claim.

~~~
jaynos
To some extent, yes. You need to know where you spend your time (not down to
the minute) in order to free up time. Knowing calorie consumption helps if you
want to lose weight.

~~~
zecho
I agree with this, but data for data's sake is worthless, which is where many
life hackers get lost in the weeds.

Knowing your calorie count helps you understand where you may be
overestimating your exercise and underestimating your intake, which is a
common problem when people try to lose weight. As you gain more experience,
the data itself becomes less and less useful.

I'm not convinced that ever-more-granular access to data (such as precise
micronutrients) makes people any healthier than those who don't pay attention
to them.

All things in moderation. Including moderation.

------
Dewie
> Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your
> time—so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?

Is there anything more self-defeating than investing money to get more money,
only to reinvest the profits of the investment?

