LifeHack, GTD, ZTD and Friends

What is LifeHack, GTD, ZTD, and LifeHack 2.0?

LifeHack 1.0 is productivity tips to cut through information overload, and generally to get better organized. It was extracted from highly efficient IT people, similar to Steven Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Efficient People" for the general case.

For example the book "LifeHacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day"
includes hacks such as emailing your future self (reminders), installing a personal Wiki, avoiding time wasting sites, automate repetitive tasks, control email, keep the Inbox empty, Google searching, firewalls, backups, etc.

GTD (Getting-Things-Done) is a set of tools (manual or electronic) to externalize our to-do lists, so that we need not keep them in our heads, and thus reduce stress. GTD can be seen as a glorified to-do-list, it includes calendars, workflows, 6 levels of focus and planning.

ZTD (Zen-To-Done) is a book by Leo Babauta: "Zen To Done: The Ultimate Simple Productivity System" , which claims to have combined GTD with Stephen Covey 7 Habits. ZTD focuses on developing 10 habits.

LifeHack 2.0 is a term I coined for the extension of LifeHack 1.0 to non IT subjects such as creativity, happiness, procrastination, writing and presentation skills, negotiation, investing, relaxation, mindfulness, exercise, sleep, eating habits, and giving gifts. These are some of topics you can find at LifeHack.org.

I am trying to compile LifeHack 2.0 hacks, some of these have appeared on this blog already. Hacks should be action oriented, and not domain specific. They can be inspired by philosophies and spiritual traditions, but should be acceptable to people from various beliefs.

LifeHack 2.0 Examples:

• Slowing down, take time to smell the flowers, relax
  

• To see the extra-ordinary in ordinary things

• Do simple ordinary things such as dish washing, sweeping the floor, gardening

• Less Multi-tasking, more focus on here and now
  

• Bare Attention Suspend judgment once in a while

• Clear Comprehension of Purpose
  

• Mindfulness, using every day events for reminders to be mindful (Thich Nhat Hanh suggested every time when a phone rings, to compose ourselves, before picking up the phone)

• Mindfulness of bad habits to break them

• Refactoring and re-purposing, get the task completed first and improve by refactoring (as in extreme programming). Re-use by re-purposing
  

• Continuous Learning

• Sub tasking, take one bite at a time

• Systems thinking things are interconnected. Thich Nhat Hanh's InterBeing
  

• Nice guys finish first it is always good to be good
  

• Helping others to help ourselves

• Don't use violence

All of the above hacks still need to be reworked, elaborated, or subdivided into smaller hacks.

I would be grateful for comments and suggestions of such LifeHack 2.0 tips from the readers.

Revised version: Life Hack 2.0 How-to's

LifeHack2, the new meaning of LifeHack

The original meaning of LifeHack, conceived by Danny O'Brien in 2004 was for geeks, referring to productivity tricks to cut through information overload and generally to organize.
With the passage of time, LifeHack has received a wider meaning, relevant to geeks and non-geeks alike.

Witness the contents of LifeHack.org, LifeHacker.com and 43 Folders, some of the most popular LifeHacking websites.
It is no longer just about web scraping, email spam, to-do-lists, project management, or scripting, but the topics now expanded into creativity, happiness, procrastination, writing and presentation skills, negotiation, investing, relaxation, mindfulness, exercise, sleep, eating habits and many more things we (ordinary people, not geeks) encounter every day.

Can we define this new field, which we propose to call LifeHack2, more precisely?
(Note: LifeHack2 is so called in analogy with MRP - MRP II, or Web - Web2.0.)

Danny O'Brien coined the term Life Hack originally after interviewing super-productive IT figures to know their effective habits, sort of "The habits of highly productive IT people" in analogy to Covey's "The seven habits of highly effective people".
He discovered they have common habits such as handling their to-do lists, automate email, handling spam, scripting, web scraping, make backups, and other little tricks to boost productivity and cope with information overload.
They seem to dislike and distrust complex systems and complex applications, and prefer text files, simple scripting such as offered by Python or Perl.

Surprisingly, the IT people do not always rely on the most advanced technology, instead they often use manual systems like index cards, CRC cards (Ward Cunningham introduced CRC cards for object-oriented design), and paper based to-do lists. Using the simplest possible tool is another form of Occam's razor, or KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Simple systems are always more robust and transparent.

Danny O'Brien acknowledged that sooner or later the above approach of the geeks will be applied to live in general. "The other side of it is - and this is something I talked about quite a lot - is that the hacks that work for geeks end up being useful for a lot of other people who aren't in that subculture at all." This is what we call LifeHack2.

Another development was when David Allen published the book "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity" in 2001. The abbreviation GTD (getting things done) is now everywhere. GTD can be seen as a glorified to-do-list, it includes calendars, workflow, 6 levels of focus and planning. One of the ideas of GTD is to externalize our to-do-list electronically or on paper, instead of keeping them in our heads, thus freeing the brain to do other things (less stress). Another idea is the subdivision into manageable small tasks reminiscent of extreme programming.

If you like to get a feel of GTD, it is best to just do it, for example by a paper method PocketMod or using a Tiddlywiki type of software called MonkeyGTD which needs only a browser with JavaScript.

So GTD is one of the most important LifeHacks. It is given a prominent place in LifeHack.org and 43Folders.com.
When I studied GTD, it occurred to me that GTD is an essential tool, but it tied up to general LifeHacking. For example, you can't follow GTD, if you have no energy, both in the sense of physical energy and "life energy". Avoiding energy sinkholes is an example of a related LifeHack. Relaxation in another. Mindfulness and clear comprehension are other related topics to GTD. Planning is not conceivable without clear comprehension.
Thus I came to realize that all the Buddhist notion of developing mental Faculties are related closely to GTD, and conversely, GTD help us developing the Five Faculties.

It becomes clear that the original LifeHack has slowly transform into LifeHack2.
This is illustrated by the popular articles in LifeHack.org: teaching kids charity, using compliments in communication, how to quit bad habits, how to boost creativity, how to set appointment with yourself, How to improve writing, how to restart the exercise habit, etc.

We will now try to describe what is and what is not LifeHack2.
LifeHack2 is about practical day to day matters, it is not about high brow philosophies or religions dealing with metaphysical and supernatural entities.
It is about building mental muscles, which must be practiced continuously at all times. It is developing good habits and eliminating bad habits and mind viruses.
It is not about domain-specific problems, such as hacking automobiles. However general attitudes in motorcycle maintenance, as in "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" can be considered as LifeHack2.
O'Reilly has a series of Hacks books, e.g. Excel Hacks, Google Hacks, Perl Hacks, Blackberry Hacks, FireFox Hacks. All of these are not LifeHack2, because they are domain specific.


Links:

• Interview: father of "life hacks"
  

• Danny O'BrienLife Hacks: Tech Secrets of Over prolific Alpha Geeks,Summary ,Video

• LifeHack.org

• 43Folders

• LifeHacker.com

• Guardian on David Allen "Meet the man who can bring order to your universe"

• Wired Magazine "Getting Things Done Guru David Allen and His Cult of Hyperefficiency"

• Wikipedia on GTD

• Wikipedia on GTD Software

Report: China hacked into Pentagon computer network

Is this true? The Chinese have denied it.

According to a Physorg article,

China's military successfully hacked into the Pentagon's computer network, raising fears it could disrupt the US defence department's systems, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.
The Chinese military's cyber attack was carried out in June following months of efforts, the London-based newspaper said, citing unnamed current and former US officials.
While the Pentagon declined to say who was behind the hacking, which led to the shutdown of a computer system serving the office of Defence Secretary Robert Gates, officials told the paper it was China's People's Liberation Army.

"The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system," the paper quoted a former US official as saying.

Eight Faces of a Hacker

If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

"Who are those guys?" -- Paul Newman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

You fight against them every day: hackers, attackers, insiders. You know what they do, but not who they are. They are often nameless, usually faceless. You'd like to be able to guess their next move, but that can be pretty difficult when you don't even know what motivates them or why they're attacking you.

Here are the eight faces of a hacker

Firefox open to Windows cursor attack

Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 is vulnerable to attackers armed with the Windows animated cursor exploit, despite contrary reports, a researcher claims.

Alexander Sotirov, the vulnerability researcher at Determina who discovered the ANI flaw and notified Microsoft last December, yesterday posted a demonstration of an ANI exploit that hijacks a PC when Firefox users are conned into visiting a malicious site.

"It turns out that Firefox uses the same vulnerable Windows component to process .ani files, which can be exploited in a way similar to Internet Explorer," Sotirov said during the demo.

IE attack code published online

A known flaw in Internet Explorer could be exploited by software published on the web late yesterday.

The code, posted yesterday to the Milw0rm.com website, exploits a recently patched flaw in Microsoft's browser.
It could be used to run unauthorised software on a PC that wasn't updated with the latest Microsoft patches, security experts warn.

The vulnerability was first discovered by security researcher HD Moore who posted code last July that could be used to crash the browser. Microsoft patched the flaw in February, but some researchers say it will get more attention from criminals because of this latest exploit code.
Robert McMillan

Hackers Attack Every 39 Seconds

Hackers attack computers every 39 seconds, according to new research.

The study, which investigated how exactly hackers crack computers, confirms those regularly issued warnings about password vulnerability. Experts advise longer passwords, regularly changed and not based on users' biographies, that mix letters and numerals and are hard to guess.

To test how hackers break into computers, Cukier’s team set up weak security on four Linux computers connected to the Internet and monitored hacker attacks.

Unlike the sophisticated hackers portrayed on TV and in films, these hackers weren’t targeting specific computers.

“Most of these attacks employ automated scripts that indiscriminately seek out thousands of computers at a time, looking for vulnerabilities,” Cukier said.

The hackers used a type of software called a “dictionary script” that runs through lists of common usernames and passwords to break into the computer.