Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mantalk 5572 days ago
Life is an experiment. Whatever you do, try, learn, iterate.

Remember, though, that time is your precious resource. You'll never, ever get it back. All life hacks must either extend your time, shorten tasks, or make your time more meaningful.

Here are a few things that came to mind:

Productivity:

* Make a check list. Once you start, you won't be able to believe that you lived life without one. Can't overstate this one.

* I wrote a script that takes screenshots every half minute and lets me see what I've been doing. Huge time-saver. Check-lists also help.

Mental/Spiritual/Creative Well-being:

* Read an actual book that's actually not on a screen. Don't do anything else concurrently.

* Keep short, creative side-projects/weekend projects that you can be excited about. It'll keep your creative juices flowing.

* If you're in a rut, start saying "yes" to things more. It's too easy to stay in.

Fitness:

* Cold shower in the morning, and/or swimming in cold water. A few minutes of this and you'll feel like you ran 10 miles.

* If you're going to enjoy soda or something bad for you, enjoy it in small sips.

* F.lux for your eyes.

* Eat when you're hungry or low on energy. Don't eat when you're not hungry or not low on energy.

Social interaction:

* "Flirt" with everybody. Men and women. Don't overdo it or be weird about it, but the qualities that are successful in flirting tend to be endearing.

* Pay attention to people. "Being there" mentally can be hard, especially when you're tired or your company is tiring, but you've got to try.

* Low self-confidence is a road to all bad things. You're better than that.

* "I like your shirt/watch/shoes/bag" and get ready to hear a story.

* If you can use someone's name, use it. If you can't (and I forget names _all the time_) see if you can introduce a nearby friend. ->* Need help remembering names? Apparently this is an old sales trick (I haven't tried it but it's brilliant): index names in your phone book by category, as you may know WHERE you know a person from but may not be able to remember their name. So for a guy you know from college and whose number you have but you can't remember his name, you can go through your "College" contacts to find "College Ted." Hopefully the name resonates when you see it; I haven't tried this yet.

Time for sleep, I think, but hope these are helpful to someone...

2 comments

This is really a great list. I think the best of all is the "flirt with everybody" thing. So right. Nothing comes without training, and chances is it will influence people almost no matter how good you look like (except of course if you really smell or really appear unnatural, which you address anyway in the next bullet).
can u publish that script that takes a screen shot?
A simple one for OSX:

while true; do screencapture `date '+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%I'`.png; sleep 30; done

http://www.rescuetime.com/ will give you analytics for free
I've used this before as an offline app http://www.manictime.com/ (win)
Very cool--thanks, guys!