That aligns perfectly with O’Brien’s observations of productive hackers. Instead of using a dozen different apps to get work done, they master their text editor and use it for everything from writing memos and To Do lists to shell scripts.

Hacks are to productivity what recipes are to cooking. You have to come to the kitchen with the basic skill set already in place for them to be useful.

So my critique of “lifehacks” is much like my critique of “productivity”; it’s placed at how we’ve missed the point, which is true, but it does it an a way that’s not nearly fine-grained as it needs to be.

This is a discourse that goes in cycles. In the eighties it was fashionable to talk about productivity (“effectiveness”) in overly broad terms — “be proactive,” “synergize” — that weren’t very actionable. This decade the pendulum has swung from “capital letter nouns,” as Merlin Mann would call them, to “hacks,” which are more actionable but often more superficial.

No system is going to equally emphasize the balance of vision, strategy, methods and techniques necessary to be consistently productive. Any time you make a point, you’re also not making another point.

I’m jealous that you’re going to SXSW. Have fun, and thanks for the bookmarking love!

Well, the first 10 filters catch 50%, right? ;) And the next 10 catch 10%, and the next 10 catch 5%, and then after that I have all these filters that are used maybe once a week or once a month. I’ll catch up to your 415 filters yet! Hehe.

As one who often beats up on lifehacks, I really loved your call to be more clear about my objections. Actually, your presence in my reader, on PF, and as what I’d like to call a friend calls me to be more clear about most of what I do.

My struggle with lifehacks as we know it is that I see too many lifehack-ey suggestions that add additional techniques or solutions that don’t address the root cause of the problem. Rather than looking at how to do something thirteen different ways, it’s often better to increase core competency in the main way you experience or interact with something.

But real lifehacks eliminate the problems or give us a better way (as opposed to a different way) of dealing with the problem. I have no beef with those kinds of solutions and have a standing meta-process that helps me come up with them.

So my critique of “lifehacks” is much like my critique of “productivity”; it’s placed at how we’ve missed the point, which is true, but it does it an a way that’s not nearly fine-grained as it needs to be. Thanks for pushing me.

I love this post – if I can get to it before I head to SxSW, I’ll continue the discussion on PF. Stumbled, Reddited, Tagged, and Tweeted!

In short, “Life hacks are instances of an ethos some people call Kaizen…” would be a problem-free statement.

That makes sense. Correction accepted ;)

That said, some people – in Toyota and elsewhere in the world – do label the ethos you describe as Kaizen, for lack of a more appropriate, pre-existing name.

In short, “Life hacks are instances of an ethos some people call Kaizen…” would be a problem-free statement.

Anyway, a fine post. Looking forward to more!

It’s true that the “continuous” aspect of the word’s mythology stems from its use around the Toyota Production System, but that’s an exception that illustrates the theme of this post: identifying needed changes to patterns, not instances. When a defect happens the manufacturing of widgets, the operations manager looks for the process that lead to the defect rather than treating the defect as an anomaly. Forgetting my ID badge could have been an anomaly, but treating “remembering to bring the badge” as a recurring pattern opens the possibility of making a change in that pattern. “Systemic progress” expresses mindset here with less baggage than kaizen.

One tangent: “Life hacks are instances of an ethos the Japanese call Kaizen: the focus on continuous, methodical improvement…”

If you’d welcome a small correction, the above is an instance of the modern “kaizen” myth. For the record, that’s not what the Japanese word means, and there is no such “Japanese ethos”. For the real story:
http://www.homejapan.com/2009/03/debunked-kaizen

(That’s a post I’ve been meaning to write for some time; thanks for providing impetus. Another small improvement chalked up!)