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Photo: Indranil Mukherjee

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

If you want to get rid of flies the smart way, you must read the entries on 43folders.com. One of it says: "If you don't mind killing the fly and washing your hands, you can effectively catch flies 90 per cent of the time by clapping your hands about an inch over their heads after they've settled. The motion of your hands scares the fly into launching itself directly into the path of your hands coming together." For shortcuts, ranging from swatting flies to kicking the habit of chronic nail biting, for interior d‚cor 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 overprolific' 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, streetsmart 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,''says Satish N., a computer programmer who doubles up as a life hacker and posts his own swat-the-fly, beatthe- boss, roast-the-pig-better- way advice on the web. "The main problem of not being productive is not that you are short on talent or whatever," says Raghu, a human resource manager. To straighten you out in area of life, life-hacking sites provide a whole encyclopaedia of playful and ingenioustips. "Many of our routine jobs are awful timesuckers," rues Praveen, a techie. Productivity takes a hit if you brain-dump things. For 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."

For a great intro:

Clive Thompson’s ‘Meet the Life Hackers’,

New York Times, Sunday magazine, October, 16, 2005.

43folders.com

lifehacker.com

lifehack.org

For college students, hackcollege.com

Danny O ’Brien’s Oblomovka.com

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