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Photo: Indranil Mukherjee

Constantly at work Getting things done (GTD) in your own way is possible now

For shortcuts, ranging from swatting flies to kicking the habit of chronic nail biting, for interior décor to clearing out the home-grown mess, for how to sleep to how to beat those zombie moods to how to cure gothy fascination for shooting oneself in the foot, for computer programming and troubleshooting to revving up one’s productivity, for squeezing every ounce of performance from cool gadgets to making ornaments, join the movement called ‘life hacking’, a term British tech writer Danny O’Brien coined. There are tips to trade, secrets to share, problems to parse, retool the stuff.

Danny O’Brien interviewed ‘sickeningly over-prolific’ computer geeks as to how they organise things and get things done (GTD) faster and better. There were some common patterns: instead of using fancy, multi-tasking things to organise data, they had surprisingly basic, street-smart solutions to ‘see them through the day.’ (Hack is a shortcut solution for routine but time-guzzling jobs.)

“Well, to put it simply, it’s about sharing tips for removing clutter both physical and mental, boosting productivity, and big it up,” says Satish N., a computer programmer who doubles up as a life hacker and posts his own swat-the-fly, beat-the-boss, roast-the-pig-better-way advice on the web. “It’s become a movement.” For Hemachander B., a fan of exam hacks, ‘cool tips to prepare for exams like CAT and GRE have come as a boon.

“The main problem of not being productive is not that you are short on talent or whatever,” says Raghu, a human resource manager. “It’s that you are short on organising and time-management skills.” To straighten you out in area of life, life-hacking sites provide a whole encyclopaedia of playful and ingenious tips. “Many of our routine jobs are awful time-suckers,” rues Praveen, a techie, adding: “In the middle of distractions and so many useless meetings, you got to be productive. But tips on lifehacker.com restored my sanity.”

Most of the problems aren’t philosophical--- you know, things like, asking you to prove your existence or non-existence--- unless it’s one of our government offices where you’re routinely asked to prove you are living or even append your signature in the form stating you have effectively been dead for all the practical purposes. Most of our problems are, like, ‘do-I-catch-the-bus’, ‘my- dress-looks-neat-or- not’, ‘how-to-beat-the-traffic’, ‘no-water-no-power’ variety---all very mundane except for their effect of short-circuiting the brain. “Even for these there are excellent tips on life hacking sites.”

Productivity takes a hit if you brain-dump things. For a professional procrastinator like Aravind G., a computer programmer, (who might as well have a PhD on subjects like procrastination and productivity), when unfinished things---they are whole hell of a lot ---glare at him, his head goes pop. “They are not demons as such,” he says. “But the thoughts of unfinished business sneak up while you are on an important work and ‘panic sets in’, spoiling the job at hand and not doing anything about the ‘unfinished things.’ To get his groove back on, he invented a simple life hack: “I keep a notebook and dump in all the intrusive stuff to keep my mind free to work on the job on hand.”

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