Captain’s Log

It’s been about a year since I became entranced by the concept of “life hacking”, an idea so nebulous and delicious that I’m hard-pressed to define it. I’ll let my favourite website do the talking for me:

Here a “hack” is a clever shortcut or a lesser-known, faster way to get something done. A hacker believes that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is a hacker’s duty to share her expertise—so we will. The “life” part comes in because while the hacks you’ll find here will focus mostly on technology—like how to automatically back up your hard drive, they’ll also extend to things like how to re-purpose a shoe-holder to organize your gadgets or build an air conditioner for under 30 bucks.

Basically it’s all about treating your own life like a system and tweaking using tricks and tools to get the most out of it. Herein “most” pretty much means “productivity” but you get the gist of it. I’ve been lifehacking myself for a while now, and I feel great.

The first thing I ever did was sit down with my backpack and scribble down exactly what I want to change in myself. This smacks of the kind of high school guidance counselor wankery that I myself find insufferable, but as any of my close friends can attest my life’s taken a remarkable turn for the better since I got my act together.

I’d like to start sharing my own lifehacking tactics, but I want to begin with a return to that first act: deciding what in the hell I want to do with myself. I’m terribly pleased with this blog’s ability to orient my thoughts and ambitions along the right track, so I intend to utilize this to the fullest.

This is my mission statement for the foreseeable future:

-Blog it all! I’m dedicated to updating this blog every week day, barring extenuating circumstances that make it impossible to reasonably do so. I also need to completely stop beating myself up about the
quality of my work compared to experienced writers: I will be better a hundred posts down the line, the important part is for me to put in the work.

-Experiment! I’m planning on setting myself up on NewsBeet as soon as I can gather a clear idea of where I’d take such a project. There are a million similar sites corralled in the starred section of my Google Reader archives and it’s time I reach out and see what else I can make happen.

-Centralize my data!  Right now I’m using Google Reader, Delicious, Digg, Google Notebook, and even more to share what I’m reading and doing.  It’s counter-productive and going nowhere, I need to organize my online life and that means overcoming my trysts with every gorgeous new website I stumble across.

-Take more pictures! Consider a Flickr account because goddamnit that seems to be important. If a platform has managed to succeed at the nigh unthinkable task of becoming the de facto image storage site on the internet, pretty much the second thing the Internet was created to do after showing text, I think it deserve my attention. It’ll have to wow me if it seeks to replace the extremely slick and easy to use Picasa/Google web albums setup I have at present, but I’m willing to give it a chance. This means carrying my doddering but still functional digital camera around with me from time to time, which will work out great since my next point is to…

-Get out of the damn house! I’m actually in a fairly good place with my physical fitness lately, which is something I’ve struggled with for years. Still, taking on an office job this summer has lent itself to a lot of time at the computer, even by my admittedly nerdly standards. I note with ennui that mother Nature has churned out a rain storm on the day of my declaring this. What’s a geek to do?

-Read more! I’m finally over the titanic Atlas Shrugged and in the seven or so months it’s taken me to move on (though not fully finish) this tome I’ve amassed a small army of books deserving of my attention. It’s time to cleanse Objectivism from my palette. First in the queue are Shoeless Joe, East of Eden, and 1984. If you’ve got a novel you’re willing to endorse as something I just have to read then by all means, leave a comment.

-Comics three times a week! This was the initial ambition that led to me taking up the blog in the first place. I’m planning to crank out a comic from my hand-scrawled reservoir every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from now on. Which means I ought to wrap this up as soon as I can, yikes.

-Music on Thursdays! This consumed the entirety of Bit Part 1.0 last year, and I’ve certainly had enough of dedicating all my written energy to the such a pastime. Still, music remains a great love of mine and I can never quell the urge to share what I’m loving. Ye be warned.

-Figure out Twitter! I can’t for the life of me find a single person I know who actually uses this service, but the ability to constantly update my status through a single service and have it displayed hereabouts is enticing. Some API tinkering will be involved, stay tuned.

-Stop spending money! This last one is crucial. I’m rewarding myself for days where I don’t spend any cash at all, and picking up extra hours at work so that I can still hit my goal of saving $3k+ by the end of September. I’m going to start tracking myself more closely and hold myself to a tighter budget. Hopefully this will literally pay off.

Time to plunge headlong into Photoshop.