This past week LifeHack and LifeHacker each had posts related to things I’ve been talking about.
In case you don’t know what lifehacks are, they are “hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating, increase productivity and organizing” according to LifeHack. LifeHacker has a similar explanation here, though they seem to focus more on the technology aspect of the lifehacks.
Why there are two separate blogs, so similarly named, that are both among the most popular on the blogosphere, I’m not entirely sure, but you can be sure I’ll be trying to figure that out at some point because they are getting buku traffic.
So the first was about my beloved Kindle – where thanks to LifeHacker I learned that I could email .pdfs to my Kindle and read them there. This is great because my blackberry is useless for reading .pdfs.
My Kindle has already saved me money by allowing me to “save for later” books I would have otherwise bought on the spot with my Amazon 1-Click account and probably never read. As I mentioned last week, I’ve got a slight book addiction and I’ve got about 40 unread books stacked on my bookshelf. Now, I can just “save for later” instead of buying. That should save me a few hundred dollars a year, at least!
And following up on my whole riff about Perfectionism as a form of Procrastination and why you should be more like Bezos, Gates and Jobs, LifeHack attempts to identify an actual process you can use for “Getting to Good Enough.”
I have to say though, I’m not entirely convinced by their process because I don’t think the perfectionist ever makes it past their first step, which is too bad because the remaining steps are good – they can be summarized as 1) build your confidence by taking small steps and working through your issues and they’ve got good tips for doing that, 2) be willing to make mistakes because that’s how you learn and 3) be human.
All great stuff, but if you tell the perfectionist to plan first, they may never get beyond that and on to steps 2, 3 and 4, which are really the most important.
Here’s my one and only step – do something, anything, it doesn’t matter how small, how bad, how much – just do some thing. From there, you’ll know what you need to do next. No more planning, it’s time to do it.
