Now is the time of year where things can get pretty hectic — and likely already are. Today’s offering in Lifehack’s 12 Days of Giveaways is one that can serve to slow you down when you’re going to need it the most. It’s a great book by Patrick Rhone (Minimal Mac, the Enough podcast) called…

Yes, a book-hater. I was never a big fan of reading, and I had my reasons. But I’ve changed, and now I constantly find myself in situations where there’re too many great books and too little time. Thankfully, I’ve stumbled upon something called speed reading and now I can share a list of my favorite tricks.

Commuting between work and home can be a frustrating and inefficient experience. But it does not have to be. There are many productive (and safe!) ways to make the most of your time while you’re behind the wheel. For example: Learn a new language Burn some CDs with language lessons (you can easily find them on…

Reading helps us in every area of our lives. It helps us become successful in school and later in our careers, it helps us grow as individuals by either teaching us new information or by allowing us to step into someone else’s shoes. Reading can also help us become more compassionate and empathetic, as well as give us pure enjoyment and relaxation.

Aside from partying, the thing you’re probably going to do most in college is read. Assuming you’re at all serious about your education, you’ll read so much that words will come out your ears. Unfortunately, much of what you read will also go pouring out your ears, or so it will seem looking back. One of…

Although I am a professional writer and blogger, although I keep up with the latest tech trends, although I am, might I say, something of a geek, I do not iPod. I don’t even iPhone. This is not a political nor even a religious position, it is simply the Way That It Is. When Microsoft…

  We here at Lifehack have been huge advocates of the Moleskine as a tool for ubiquitous capture — for jotting down ideas whenever and wherever they occur to you. They’re also great for keeping your task list and other information you might need over the course of the day. But those are hardly the only…

It’s about time to wrap up the Lifehack Great Big Summer Giveaway, and we’ve got a gorgeous leather laptop bag from Sports Accessories to wrap it up with. And since you’re bound to have some space left in the bag, we’ll throw in a $100 Amazing gift credit from the folks at…

Nothing says “relaxation” more than a good book. Whether it’s a fascinating account of the lives or events of long ago or far away (or maybe just across town), or a fantastic voyage to other worlds, or a careful description of the latest scientific discoveries, let me lose myself in a good book. Summer is especially…

In the last year, e-books have started taking off in a big way. E-books have been around for a long time, of course, but a few events in the last year suggest that they’re really starting to get traction as a viable alternative to paper-based reading. One is the success of e-books like Leo Babauta’s…

I know you can read. You’re reading this, aren’t you? (If you’re not reading this, never mind.) But are you productively literate? That is, when you read, do you learn anything that you can apply immediately to your life, or do the words and ideas just bounce around your brain’s pleasure areas for a while…

I just received my copy of Lifehack contributor Pamela Skilling’s new book Escape from Corporate America: A Practical Guide to Creating the Career of Your Dreams. Pamela’s book is a guide for people fed up with the corporate lifestyle — the lack of creative expression, the lack of spiritual reward, and ultimately…

If I were to attempt to project the demographics that make up a typical lifehackista, according to the comments I see here and the roots of the phrase life hacks, I’d say that the average specimen spends a heck of a lot of time reading and writing, online and off, pretty much every single day. It…

Ades of AdesBlog.com has a theory: that top bloggers don’t read other people’s blogs. To test his theory, he asked several big-name bloggers — Michael Arrington, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Yaro Starak — about their blog-reading habits. Except for Darren Rowse, they all said they read few or no…

“Reading fiction is a waste of time.” Have you ever heard someone spout this line of complete and utter bollocks? I’ve rarely heard anything so ridiculous said in my life. Fiction, like all the arts, is an important part of culture; both a reflective distillation of it, and the base elements that form it. Society’s collective…