Interesting article in the NYT about Life hacking

Posted on October 16, 2005 under blog ,

Robert links to an interesting article in the NYT called “Meet the Life Hackers“. I assume this goes behind a paywall soon, grab it and save the print version.

The fun things about people sharing their life hacks is, that one day you might find somebody who is like you and you will find things which work for your. I don’t say that all the GTD people are wrong, but in my case, I tried it and it did not make my life easier. But I am absolutly sure it makes other ones much easier.

One example from the article is that you are more productive with more screen space and all things on your screen. I find myself not wanting to have different things on one screen but I work best when I do switch between the applications. As I am an information cruncher, I am also less tolerable to things happen on my screen.

Which is why I can’t have a chat running at the same time. Pinging, flashing Skype buttons? Doomed to look at it. Which is why I want mirc like settings per chat on how it should behave. And why I can’t work with Konfabulator widgets and co. Something happening at the edge of my screen? I am doomed to look at it.

Full screen, full attention. But at the same time, I do have a very good feeling of how and where things are. Like for example my first button right to the quick bar is always always Windows Explorer. If I accidently close it, I shut down every application to get it there again. I see other people searching all the time for ‘where is it?’ – not happening to me.

And I will take a look at that Clear Context software even though I am afraid it will not work well in a German Outlook. ;(