#lifehacks

These tips and tricks will guarantee you’ll be a totally happy camper this summer.

Your to-do list is the hub of your personal productivity, so it makes sense that we're attracted to to-do apps filled with bells, whistles, and tassels. Then you realize you're spending more time fiddling with your app than getting things done. If you're tired of clicking around internet-needy webapps or getting locked into a specific to-do list service, it's time to switch to something simpler. Here's why a simple text file will make your to-do lists fast, easy to manage, and seamlessly integrate with everything else you use.

So you've decided to work from home. As a rookie veteran of working without a traditional office for one year I'm here to tell you that it is the greatest and worst thing that can happen to your work life other—much like being transferred to a glitter-packing facility. What follows is a quick two minute guide of what you need to know before you take your pants off and turn up those old Hootie and the Blowfish albums.

Since writing also makes you take those ideas out of your head and put them into real words, it also challenges you to think about how you can communicate those ideas to others in a way that makes sense. You'll have to turn your abstract ideas into something that's concrete and understandable by others, and it'll challenge you to grow and develop the language and communications skills required to get those ideas across. Even if you deal in facts and figures, creative writing can help you learn to communicate complex ideas more effectively.

If you're perpetually wasting food by forgetting to use it, author Jonathan Bloom suggests dedicating a specific shelf to foods you need to use right away to avoid wasting them.

I am pleasantly boggled that this is possible, and will probably write all sorts of odd tests now. Because Cucumber can fill in web forms, click on stuff, and so on, I might even be able to use it to check information on other sites. (When I check my mail, then all the messages in my inbox should be less than a week old?)

Everybody wants stuff for free but we seldom question what it means to get something for free. Today's quotable moment is a reflection on what it means when a company gives it all away.

"On the SUSE Studio team, we had a “level playing field” rule for our weekly meetings. Even though a lot of us were clustered in Nürnberg, Germany, everyone dialed in to the meeting, putting every single person on an even footing. There’s no “local” and “remote.” Everyone has to speak clearly into the telephone. When we instituted this rule, we noticed the “remote” participants joining in the conversation a lot more often, and the calls went a lot smoother. This worked well for us. It might help you too. Let me know how it goes."

"I've been using Tinderbox for a while as a daybook and also as a kind of task timer to help me track what I spend my time on at work (purely for my own interest and education rather than for billing purposes, as many people do). However since I wrote those articles, I've altered the file a bit, and also discovered the Pomodoro Technique, which I'm finding really helpful, so I thought I'd write a bit about how I use the two together."

"Basically, you'll start the day off right by grabbing a sheet of paper and writing down the goals which you can realistically accomplish that day. The important part is to immediately assign time slots to those tasks by order of importance and difficulty because these designated times make you more likely to accomplish your goals and give you a way of tracking your progress once every hour. At the end of the work day, you'll take a few minutes to review not just the last hour, but the entire day."

"You can still do the other goals, but put them off for a month or two. Focus on one goal for at least a month … and turn it into a habit. So if you want to run a marathon, create the habit of running each day. If you want to write a novel, create the habit of writing each morning. If you want to create a successful blog, create the habit of writing insanely useful posts each day. Once your first goal becomes a habit and is on autopilot, turn to the next goal — you don’t have to worry as much about the first goal because it has become automatic."

This guy describes a technique for fast walking around an urban corner with lots of foot traffic - sounds a lot like how I walk in first person shooters. :)

'His "Plan" was made up of 13 virtues, each with short descriptions'

"The Caffeine Nap is simple. You drink a cup of coffee and immediately take a 15 minute nap."

"When you get a new gadget, only take the stuff you actually need out of the box."

"If you're a hunt-and-peck typist and would like to train yourself to touch type, go grab some interactive fiction games "

"You must keep the nap to 20 minutes or slightly less, and if you need the extra sleep, wait until the 50-minute mark."

"Shaped paper notepad"

"If living in a state of continuous partial attention is the permanent new reality, let’s engineer our interruptions to be subtle, natural, and pleasing to the senses."

"if you're in stop and go traffic, ...relax and hang back..., you increase the gap to two or three and try to maintain that."

"ere is a new guest editor over at Lifehacker.com and that she was looking for submissions so I put pen to paper and came up with the following life hacks."

"This is a meditation manual, a nuts-and-bolts, step-by-step guide to Insight meditation. It is meant to be practical. It is meant for use."

"Spirited Away checks each running application's activity, and if an application isn't active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically."

"Once installed, you will be pestered every 5 minutes to make a case for your further web browsing."

I'm a bit surprised at how many of these I already do :)