30 Useful Life Hacks That Are Worth Noting

Although the term ‘life hacks’ is relatively new, the idea behind it is anything but. People have shared knowledge and better ways to do things since the start of recorded history. You can see an example of vintage life hacks in another article that we’ve posted.

So, where did this modern take on the term come from? It was originally coined in 2004 by Danny O'Brien, a technology journalist. O’Brien talks about this with Gina Trapani of LifeHacker.com, the website founded under the same expression of his. 

O’Brien said, “Life hacks popped out of an ongoing discussion I'd been having with people about ‘secret software’—the scripts that geeks write for themselves to get them through the day. Hacks are often a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, non-obvious fix.”

“So, the idea of life hacks is just really appealing to geeks,” O’Brien continues, “because it's an expression of this huge hope that you can actually hack life in this way, that you might make it a bit more bearable without having to swallow or understand the whole thing.”

O’Brien explains how these newly dubbed ‘life hacks’ expand to the meta: “The hacks that work for geeks end up being useful for a lot of other people who aren't in that subculture at all.”

Although it started its early years as perhaps a geeky term, it’s expanded to become commonplace online and has now been included in the dictionary too. It’s a fun expression that makes sense for the internet generation and it sounds better than “general life productivity tips”.

In essence, that’s what they are: productivity tips for life. So, they can help you get better at pretty much anything. For example, building confidence in social situations, learning how to save money, or just general life skills. 

And learning such life skills will last a lifetime. Staying organized is just one way of thinking about it. In fact, a paper was published on the benefits of being organized for students, and how it reflects on their grades. 

In short, those students who learned how to organize themselves and their work, ended up with better grades and a more positive outcome overall. Respectively, those who were less organized had results that were quite the opposite.

Preventing procrastination is also one of the top themes that we see in our list of life hacks. According to one study, approximately 80% of college students consider themselves procrastinators. At least the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one.

So, take heed students, there’s plenty of life hacks here to help you get started on that paper you've been putting off. Or maybe it’s some cleaning tips that are needed—we all know how bad student dorms can get when you’re sharing with half-a-dozen other people.

Bored Panda spoke to Graham Allcott, founder of Think Productive. Graham is an author, speaker and podcaster, who encourages everyone to do their best work. I asked Graham what makes people procrastinate so often. He explains it brilliantly: "I use an acronym to diagnose where procrastination comes from: D.U.S.T. – so is the thing difficult, undefined, scary or tedious."

"Usually procrastination occurs because the survival part of our brain, the amygdalla, or ‘lizard brain’, is very good at steering us towards avoiding stuff that we’re scared of or don’t want to do. So it’s important to try and understand what the root cause is."

He continues with how we can avoid each of the points on his D.U.S.T. metaphor. David said, "If something is difficult, it’s about replacing that item on our to-do list with the training or advice we need to overcome the difficulty."

"If it’s undefined, we need to break the task or project down into tangible next steps and endpoints so that it’s clearer. If it’s scary, we need to look at how we can use things like deadlines or accountability, and if it’s tedious, we need to find a way to make it more enjoyable (like allowing yourself to watch some Netflix while you file your expense receipts)."

Learning new habits such as these life hacks can take some brain reprogramming, of sorts. Once you get into them, though, they’re hugely beneficial. I remembered James Clear’s advice from his book Atomic Habits.

In the book, James calls habits: “the compound interest of self-improvement”. He explains by saying, “They don't seem like much on any given day, but over the months and years their effects can accumulate to an incredible degree.”

Graham Allcott also explained further about our habits. I asked him why we get stuck in our routines, even if there's better way to complete them. Graham answered, "Habits, by their nature, are ‘effortless’, meaning we don’t have to think too much and act mostly on a kind of autopilot, which is a convenient and sometimes essential way of dealing with the pace and complexity of work."

"It takes time and effort to think about the processes of work at the same time as the content of our work," Graham continued, "so either if we’re feeling lazy or we’re just dealing with a fast paced environment, we tend to avoid thinking about the processes of work and just focus on getting through the day with the least effort."

Graham gives us more insights into productivity and asks us to rethink what we know about it. Graham said, "The main thing when it comes to productivity is to abandon the idea of time management altogether." He believes that: "What really matters is ‘attention management’—this is about recognizing the times in your day and in your week where your mind is at its most focussed and applying those hours of attention to the hardest thing on your list. Conversely, you can save up the easy tasks for when your brain is fried at the end of a day or week."

Graham continues, "The best way to approach this is to keep a diary for a week or so and really understand your own peaks and troughs in terms of energy, and then keep tasks on your to-do list based on the varying levels of energy needed to complete them. So, for example, my to-do list has three separate categories: ‘normal’ tasks, ‘deep-thinking/high attention’ tasks, and ‘mindless’ tasks."