This postChris Brogan has written another great article on Lifehack.org, called Editing Your Life:
I’ve been working with a lot of editing lately: removing dead space and clicks and “ums” from audio podcasts, clipping off the unimportant or blurry in video footage, trimming useless or hard-to-understand words out of posts and articles. It strikes me that editing is an important part of maintaining a productive and effective life.
And he goes on to list some of the ways we can edit out things in our life that get in the way of our being the most productive we can be. Consumption is one (and hang it all, whenever I whittle my Bloglines list down to a reasonable number, I stumble across a bunch of great blogs and pretty soon I’m back up to 150+ feeds ~sigh~), as are hobbies and commitments. As Chris says, “the enemy of great is good.” There’s too much to do in life, plain and simple, and one of the most important skills we can master is figuring out what exactly is important and what’s not. Why spend time on things that don’t matter? I like collecting things — books, languages, hobbies, websites, you name it. Just not year-old lumps of moldy bread. Anything but that. :) And this collector nature of mine, along with a passionate desire to learn about everything, leads me to pile far more on my plate than I could ever hope to get through. That’s not always good. It is good to be active and passionate, yes, but we have to make sure we don’t overdo it lest we drop the plate and watch it shatter while all its contents fly in a dozen different directions.
For those who are wondering what a lifehack is, let me quote that fountain of all knowledge, yea, even Wikipedia itself. ;)
A good lifehack solves a problem in your life that is in need of an ingenious solution, often cheaper and quicker than the “right” solution, while simultaneously giving the added pleasure of having solved the problem uniquely.
