Confessions of a Recovering Lifehacker

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the hell of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dream of such new laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. Confessions of a recovering Lifehacker by John Pavlos. I used to be a life hacking addict, and in some ways, I still am. I have a perverse love of systems and efficiency, analyzing, configuring, optimizing, categorizing, defining, and parameter setting. I loved my first PalmPilot.

I read Getting Things Done over a Christmas break for fun, and I took a jerkish kind of pride in replacing whatever corporate email solution a job might foist upon me with my own selfishly optimized system. There was always a better way to do almost anything. But sometime over the last couple years, around the time I turned 30, not coincidentally, it has begun to dawn on me. Maybe all the time I spend looking for better ways to do things is keeping me from, well, doing things. It's like running on a treadmill.

You might get in really good shape, I guess, but you never actually go anywhere. They call it, quote, life hacking. And it's a damn catchy term, but it's also a misnomer in 9 out of 10 cases. That's because most of the stuff that pours out of these sites isn't really about hacking your life. It's about constantly fiddling around with all the bullshit that too often gets in the way of your life.

Email, paying bills, troubleshooting, syncing all your crap with all your other crap, remembering things you tend to forget because they're boring, tedious, or annoying in the first place. The life part comes from the assumption that in our modern world, all this bullshit is a given that you have to put up with in large quantities. The hacking part is there to assert that since you're going to spend a lot of your life putting up with this unopt outable bullshit anyway, you may as well fiddle around with said bullshit so that you can, one, give yourself some feeling of agency over its inescapable presence in your life, and 2, maybe, if you're lucky, make it all stink a little less. Essentially, this kind of hacking is all about trying to make the best of something that is handed to you without your necessarily asking for it and designed by someone else for someone else's benefit. And it's a useful skill to have.

No doubt. But is that really the way you want to think about your life? Tweaking your system for getting things done is easier than deciding what the hell you want to do with your life. A lot of super smart, talented folks really go down the rabbit hole with this life hacking stuff. Why?

Maybe, like me, they just have a proclivity for that kind of thinking. Maybe they actually, truly find meaning in it and in helping other people find meaning in it. But in a lot of cases, also like mine, I think life hacking is so seductive because it's simply easier than asking some bigger, harder, more important questions about where your time and attention go. To return to the hacking analogy, it's just plain easier to tinker and tweak something you assume you're stuck with, for better or worse, than it is to design something from scratch. It's less tiring.

It's less frustrating. It's less frightening. It takes less commitment. There aren't any unknown unknowns. The failures are less painful and the successes are more frequent.

In short, the stakes are low. For example, if you don't conquer your inbox, it'll still be an annoyance that sort of stresses you out, but whatever. You're used to it, and everyone else has the same problem. Right? If you do, hey.

Bonus. That aspect of bullshit you have to deal with is a bit less annoying and stressful, for now anyway, and you probably enjoyed a little morsel feeling of control and satisfaction to boot. Maybe if you read that productivity blog more often, you'll get to have that feeling again. No harm. No foul.

Nice hack. Meanwhile, here are the bigger questions you successfully avoided asking and answering. Why do I get so much email in the first place? How important is all that email to what I'm doing? What am I doing?

None of those questions can be answered by installing a new browser plugin, and the mere act of asking them, much less answering them, raises the stakes rather uncomfortably. There you were, harmlessly complaining about your email, and all of a sudden, you're running headlong into, like, life stuff. So if life hacking isn't the answer, and in fact, maybe obscuring meaningful questions, what do you do? I'm not sure. That's why I refer to myself as a recovering life hacker.

It's still in progress for me too, but here's some of the stuff I've learned that seems promising. Number 1. Less lifehacking, more life designing. This has nothing to do with being artsy. It just means start from scratch, question assumptions, and imagine outcomes.

The point is that you envision what you want to do, be, or happen first, not tools, processes, defaults, or what's possible. It's hard, but it clarifies what's real right up front when it matters most. Tim Ferriss might come off like some unholy combination of Tony Robbins and a meth addict, but his 4 hour work week book is a pretty unimpeachable object lesson in clearing away assumptions and redesigning one's life from first principles. But you don't have to be that radical. Just be less passive in all those subtle ways we all are, Take responsibility, stop worrying about what other people might think, and own what happens to you.

2, The best app, tool, gadget, or hack for the job is the one you have with you. Sound like settling? No. It just means keeping your tools and processes in the proper perspective. Namely, they are a means to an end, not the end in themselves.

When you assume that what you've got in hand right now is good enough, you stay focused on doing, not fiddling. Only when you discover that a particular tool or process is completely inadequate, or gets in the way more than it gets out of your way, and this will happen naturally, only then will you shift your attention to looking for a replacement. The least possible practical amount of organization is best. A good friend recently told me his whole working philosophy is based on laziness. But this guy is not lazy.

He just realized that systems, categories, hierarchies, all the stuff that life hackers nerd out on to keep chaos at bay, it all takes significant energy and attention to set up and maintain. And more often than we'd like to admit, that energy and attention doesn't translate into being more effective. In fact, above a certain threshold, imposing more order on a system detracts from its effectiveness. Consider a silverware drawer. I used to put forks, knives, spoons, etcetera, in their own separate compartments, but my wife just takes the clean silverware out of the dishwasher and dumps it into the drawer.

It used to drive me nuts until I realized her non system didn't make grabbing a fork out of the drawer at dinner time any more difficult. It was actually better because I was no longer wasting time maintaining my useless silverware categories and wasting my energy trying to convince her they were worthwhile. In this case, barely any organization at all was just the right amount. Of course, if you pulled this stunt in a restaurant kitchen, you'd be screwed. But that system probably has its own least practical level of organization.

Unclench the fists a little and get a little more comfortable with chaos. Perversely, your life will get simpler. You are very important, but only to certain people. Make sure you identify them correctly. Why do I check my inbox, Twitter feed, smartphone notifications, and blog stats like a crack fiend?

Because I really like feeling important. I like getting messages instantly because their manufactured urgency makes me feel like my attention is a hot commodity clamored for by thronging masses. And it's true. My attention is a hot commodity, but not to 95% of the people behind those dings and pings. They don't really care about me or my attention at all, other than as a means to their own ends.

If I emailed them back right now or 2 hours from now, tomorrow, or never, it very well might make no real difference in the big picture. You know who does care about my attention? My wife, my friends, the family members I don't call often enough. To them, I actually am important. Why not act accordingly?

I'm not saying you should just blow off your communication related obligations at will, but being omni available in real time should not be your default if you can help it. Let's be honest. The consequences of ignoring or deferring incoming messages until you are ready to view them are abstract and vastly overestimated, while the consequences of being that jerk who keeps checking his iPhone at dinner are very, very real. Life hacking is fine. I don't mean to imply it's a scourge like polio that should be stamped out for the overall good of the human race, or the people who write productivity blogs or gremlins out to sap your life force.

But the truth is that this kind of stuff is not going to help you figure out how to live well. Unlike a whole lot of other things in this world, it can actually hinder you if you're not careful. The best book about work and productivity I ever read wasn't even about that. It's called This is Water. I just reread it myself, and here's the gist.

Life, the only one you get, consists of what you pay attention to. There's literally nothing else. The awesome thing is that no one gets to decide what you pay attention to except you. It seems easy, banal even. It's not.

Learning how to do it effectively, meaningfully, and relatively unselfishly is pretty much the most profound thing you can attempt to do with the time you've got left and there ain't no app for that. We are crazy focused these days on getting more stuff done in less time. If you do a search on Amazon for one minute, you get stuff like the One Minute Manager, the new One Minute Manager, the One Minute Cure, the secret to healing virtually all diseases, the One Minute Organizer, plain and simple, Leadership, and the One Minute Manager. This is my favorite. One Minute with God, Sixty supernatural seconds that will change your life.

Really? A minute? We're trying to manage, cure diseases, and get close with God in a minute? I think we may have gone a little bit too far here. So the reason I like this article is because the author is talking about not just optimization for the sake of optimization.

That is useless, but rather optimizing for what is important. So a couple of things in this one that I really like. The first is when he starts talking about email. It's super easy to get wrapped around making sure that your email inbox is super tidy, and then you become a slave to that email inbox instead of approaching it by saying, why am I getting so much email? What what am I doing?

Is this even important? You just look at the email and the system you have set up to handle the email as some sort of optimization. But at the root, you haven't addressed the serious question. I love it when he says it's much easier to tweak your system for getting things done than to figure out what the heck you're doing with your life. One of the things that I started doing after I read this article a long time ago was I changed how I managed my sock drawer.

And, yes, it's as profound as it sounds, my my sock drawer. My sock drawer is completely optimized at this point, but it's not optimized for matching socks or looking organized. It's optimized for the way that I actually live my life. Let me explain. Every now and then, I buy a crazy amount of socks on Amazon, but I only buy one kind of sock.

Every time, it's the exact same kind. So what this allows me to do is wash all of my socks, dump them in the drawer. Never worry about matching them. Never worry about losing a sock. If a sock starts to get a little hole in it, you know what I do?

I throw it away. And I throw one away at a time because I don't care about pairs because they're all the same. I've got 30 socks in the drawer that are the exact same. So if I wanna throw 1 away, I throw it away. And somehow, you know how you always lose socks in the washing machine?

Doesn't matter. I've got 30. I can lose a couple, so I don't have all these orphaned socks floating around. I've got one style of sock. Every morning, I just grab 2 of them, and they're guaranteed to match, and it's awesome.

Yeah. It's probably a little bit crazy, but I've optimized that little portion of my life. I don't ever worry about socks. Never. Never worry about socks.

So for me, the organized sock drawer was a system that I thought had to be maintained because we're all rational adults here, and then I realized that system does nothing for me at all. Are there systems that you're maintaining faithfully and dutifully that really don't do anything for you at all? Where's an area in your life that you can get by with the minimum viable amount of organization instead of the maximum? Okay. The last thing I wanna look at in this article is how he talks about optimizing your attention for the people that actually care about you and people that actually love you.

We're so inundated today with push notifications all the time. Somebody just did this. Somebody just did that. Somebody likes your witty observation on Twitter. We spend so much time focused on and giving our attention to people that don't really care about us and, honestly, people we don't really care about that much.

You know, the Internet masses or these people that we never really see. And yet we sit in real life with people that we love and that we care about, and we're looking at our phones trying to get favorites from people that we don't even know. Don't optimize for the wrong things. And the hard part is you gotta figure out what the things that you wanna be optimizing for are. Don't just go blindly around optimizing everything.

Figure out what is important to you, what are you trying to do, and then optimize for that. The Music Makers podcast is Being exposed to other people going after their dreams day in and day out, building incredible things, and having an awesome time doing it tends to rub off on you. You can subscribe in Itunes by searching for the Music Makers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm. And as always, you can reach me at Aaron@musicmakers.fm.