The Philosophy Of Life Hacks

Interesting article about the philosophies of life hacks and trying to be more productive, from the Financial Times:

The risk of life-hacking is that the time taken to read and absorb the hacks, let alone implement them, hugely outweighs the time they save. (This is true of computer hacks, too; Douglas Adams, no mean hacker in his day, wrote of the seductive delight of tinkering with subroutines that would save seconds each time they were used but took hours to write.) Devotees refer to this sort of thing as 'productivity porn' or, in the argot used by hackers to circumvent bowdlerising software, 'productivity pr0n'. The risk of eternal fiddling with no productive end result is all too real. I could probably increase my productivity at a stroke by not checking the Lifehacker and 43 Folders websites every morning.Life-hacking also runs counter to other productivity methodologies. In most other systems - Stephen Covey's seven habits, for example - the secret is to do less: to identify your ultimate life goals and then to eliminate any activity that does not help you work towards them. Life-hacking, by contrast, simply promises to make the things you do have to do take lesstime. It is a short game of tactical adjustments rather than a long game of vision and strategy.
Which one works for you is perhaps a philosophical rather than a practical question. Which sounds more like your life: a mounting burden of minute tasks to be rolled uphill, or the inviting view of a distant peak? Life- hacking, seen in this way, sounds like the counter-reformation. For its protagonists, however, it is closer to liberation theology.

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