[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. =)

[prg318]

Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1205/

[Blahah]

Maybe for some it was a means to the end of getting more free time. But some of us love our work, and want to fill our time with it. Lifehacks are a way to be able to waste less time, doing what we love more effectively.

[JonnieCache]

>letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s

Please post a scan of that.

Actually maybe don't, there's no way the reality of Time Management Magazine circa 1990 is going to live up to what my imagination is currently constructing.

[MDCore]

> letter of the month in Time Management Magazine in the early 1990s

Did you know you can set a "wake up time" for your computer? This is set in your computer's BIOS (Basic Input Output System). Access it by pressing F2 or Del while the RAM counts down (hurry and press it, unless you have 8Mb of RAM!) This is how I get my computer to start the lengthy boot process before I've woken up, saving me hours of waiting every month.

[jmadsen]

Hmmm... I just push the button, then go get some coffee. Thereby saving myself the time it took you to do the F2 thingy. Which I then lost writing this post to tell you about it :-(

[keefe]

I copied this sentence as well - it doesn't seem self defeating at all to maintenance one's infrastructure, just part of life.

it's interesting that we both copied that sentence because I just looked at your SN and I'm amused by the fact that I was about to paste the same quote from here at the Causata office :]