Tagged with `systems`

How to Avoid Fake Growth and a Life of Endless Seeking

Standing before you is a game filled with a complex network of mazes and ladders. When you came into this world this game was already established. All of the rules were set in place. A path was laid out before you, and as you grew, you slowly became indoctrinated into that world, into that game. It was…

Robot photo via Shutterstock

To Automate or not to Automate Your Personal Productivity System

We are all about doing things faster and better around here at Lifehack. And part of doing things faster and better is having a solid personal productivity system that you use on a daily basis. This system can be just about anything that helps you get through your mountain of projects…

to do list system

Simplify Your Productivity Tools To Get More Done

Anytime a new productivity app hits the App Store or the web it’s a race to see if it’s the next best thing; the last app you will ever need to become more productive, a better human being, or, hell, even cuter. Anytime a new “productivity guru” tells us how to get more work…

paper-planner

When a Paper Planner Can Be Your Best Productivity Tool

There are a lot of elegant tools for your OS and online that help you keep track of all your commitments, projects, tasks, goals, checklists, etc. Each of them have their own set of awesome features as well as their weaknesses. I remember around a year ago when I was lost in the sea of productivity…

over-complicating-gtd

Why We Over-Complicate GTD and What To Do About It

Disclaimer: I am a GTD guy, so I tend to interchange GTD and productivity throughout the article. If you read this blog on a regular basis, or blogs like it, it is probably to find some sort of secret way to get more done in your day. So many people after reading David Allen’s Getting Things…

Playing Through The Tape: Linking Actions To Life Goals

Staring at my lists of tasks during my weekly review (about 285 the last time I checked the count in OmniFocus) my eyes start to glaze over with the thought of just how much monotonous crap there is buried in them. What’s even more daunting is as I look over my system during my…

Are You Lifehacking Too Much?

Nick Cernis of Put Things Off recently declared that productivity is dead. He said that “our obsession with ‘productivity’ is getting in the way of our lives.” Nick started out by saying that the productivity industry is out of control, and that it’s making us less efficient, not more. I agree with Nick…

How Not to Impose Productivity Systems On Others

My baby sister visited me this weekend and brought along a stack of homework that I thought was unbelievable: she’s a junior in high school and her task list had something for every class — and projects in most of them. She keeps track of it in a planner that has such small spaces for…

Fitness from Everyday Systems

Reinhard Engels is a superhero. I first learned about him through his Shovelglove workout (which I think I first saw on Lifehacker.com). But Reinhard doesn’t just stop with a great exercise using a sledgehammer covered with a sweater (I’m not kidding). Instead, Reinhard has gone on to develop solutions to pretty much all of…

Ask Readers: Your GTD Hacks

I wasn’t going to admit this, but I can’t stay quiet: I’m really underwater because I fell off the organizational wagon. Have you ever been in this spot? You suddenly get SWAMPED with things to do, and instead of using your system to manage it, you throw it all away and just let stuff fall…