Do you have your email alerts on, Twitter apps pinging you every second, or IM up and running 24/7? Have you noticed that these constant distractions tend to, well, distract you? If so, rather than turning these things off you can design and create totally different user accounts on your Mac or PC to…

We are busier than ever. Technology is leading us down the road of being able to be busy wherever we go and at any time. It’s a constant stream of information that comes in, is processed in some way, and then goes out. We tell ourselves that we have to “make something of ourselves”…

If you’re a writer, then becoming disciplined with your writing is one of your biggest challenges. It’s not something that you tackle once and then never have to worry about again. It’s an ongoing battle. and you have to have a ton of weapons at the ready in order to take it on each…

It has taken me over 15 years to get back to writing and start taking it seriously. I have been reading and writing since I was barely out of diapers. And yet I never dared to think of myself as a writer. “God, no I can’t be one of those,” I thought. I allowed my fears of…

Today’s the last day of Lifehack’s 12 Days of Giveaways holiday promotion. It’s been a lot of fun to offer our Lifehack readers a chance to take home some great products to help them bring their personal productivity skills up a notch or two. (Or three. Or more.) For the last giveaway, we’ve got a…

(Editor’s Note: Welcome to the first 2×4 interview here on Stepcase Lifehack. 2×4 is one series that examines two topics — creativity and productivity — by asking those who make things on the web the same four questions on both subjects. This regular series of interviews began on Michael Schechter’s site as a way to better…

As computer applications mature and its base of users grow, companies tend to continually tweak their functions and add features so that the programs can meet everyone’s needs. Sometimes, the changes are universally accepted, but other times it marginalizes users looking for a specialized and lightweight program. Some writers believe that modern word processors have so…

  In my previous post at Lifehack, I wrote about the different means of finding writing ideas. But what if you already have a lot of great ideas? How will you nurture these ideas so that they will blossom into a fantastic blog post or great content? The key here is you need to know how…

With November 1st almost upon us, NaNoWriMo is set to begin. There are plenty of tools to help budding novelists achieve the goal of 50,000 words in 30 days, but what about the reasons behind committing to such a daunting task in the first place? Surely, many of those taking on the challenge have other…

I write more than the average bear and I try to write every single day no matter what. Whether it be a couple of sentences or my 750 words habit, writing is something that I enjoy doing. With the release of the iPad in 2010 there have been a slew of writers taking to…

For the longest time, I was too scared to publish anything on my blog. I had the debilitating fear of making a mistake – a simple error. What if somebody catches my mistake, corrects it and lets the world know? I would agonize over this problem. I thought my credibility as a Business Writer would be shot…

If you are a writer you may have ran into this problem. You are writing like mad, moving things, changing the way something flows. As you are getting into it, you realize. Hey! This isn’t what I want to say at all! I need to go back. You feverishly tap CTRL + z (or Command + z…

If you’ve been reading Lifehack for a while, you would have learned that blogging is the cheapest and most effective way to reach out to your clients, market your products and/or services and establish your expertise. But setting up a blog is just the first step. You can’t just write one or two posts and…

If you want to be able to do something that you love and also be able to do it well, you need to reduce the friction between thought and action. In other words, if you want to be a writer, you need to have the tools that facilitate writing at

I remember when I was younger and how I truly hated writing. If I had a paper due in school I would wait until the absolute last night before it was due to start writing. In doing that I would always set myself up for failure. My papers ended up being a mish-mosh of…