Lifehack Ideas January 2015

Gondolinian

Life hacking refers to any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life.

— Wikipedia

This thread is for posting any promising or interesting ideas for lifehacks you've come up with or heard of. If you've successfully implemented your idea, please share the results. You are also encouraged to post lifehack ideas you've tried out that have not been successful, and why you think they weren't. If you can, please give credit for ideas that you got from other people.

To any future posters of Lifehack Ideas threads, please remember to add the "lifehacks_thread" tag.

Life hacking refers to any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life.

— Wikipedia

To any future posters of Lifehack Ideas threads, please remember to add the "lifehacks_thread" tag.

For Linux users (or Mac OS X users that use the Terminal) who want to pick up a journaling habit:

I set up the following aliases to DRAMATICALLY reduce the "activation energy" for writing a journal entry:

alias jcd='cd <journal directory>'
alias today='jcd; vi `date +%Y-%m-%d`; cd -'
alias yesterday='jcd; vi `date -r \`expr \\\`date +%s\\\` - 86400\` +%Y-%m-%d`; cd -'

So if I want to write a journal entry, I just type 'today' and get started. Note that this also has the secondary benefit of keeping journal entries nicely organized by date.

BTW, I am no writer, but this technique has gotten me to write a decent amount over the years:

$ jcd; cat * | wc -w
    92804