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What are some lifehacks you would recommend?
Given the ambiguity of the term "lifehack", feel free to contribute anything that you feel fits the label. It can be a specific technique, a novel way of using an item, or even a mindset. It can be a little-known product or a recommendation--whatever you deem fit, as long as it improves quality of life, productivity, or satisfaction.
Buy 10 pairs of the same black socks, and never have to match socks again.
This is one of my favourite lifehacks, however my advice would be to buy 20 pairs of the same black socks, and stash 10 of them. That way, if/when the company stops making that exact style of sock, you still have new old stock and can integrate them into your collection. Also I would recommend integrating the new socks in slowly before the others get too worn out, so that you don't suddenly dump 10 fresh new, crisp black socks in with your 10 old pairs. If you just dump the new ones in, you still have to end up matching them anyway because the new and the old can be fairly different in terms of shape and fitment due to wear.
Why is that better than just using all 20 pairs immediately? With twice as many socks, the "wear rate" should be halved, so it works out exactly the same in the end and you don't need to worry about finding the right timing for calling in your sock reinforcements.
This is my preference. But with so many socks it becomes important to rotate them in some kind of queue to ensure somewhat even wear throughout their lifetime. Otherwise there's a pile in the back that never get used.
After you wash some socks, put them at the back of the sock drawer. Stock rotation for socks: sock rotation.
Precisely. I've also considered a long vertical 6-8" diameter tube in my closet where clean socks go in the top, and ready-to-use ones are dispensed at the bottom. Same for underwear, but I concluded this was bordering on obsession and parked the idea.
Don't do black socks. They go with nothing. A darkish gray is much more versatile.
Yea - lifehack: don't buy too many black socks! Unless they're dress socks, in which case I recommend you buy the colorful ones anyways.
This is like a corollary of the Steve Jobs lifehack where he would wear the same outfit every day to avoid wasting time on trivial things.
Automate the little things.
This is a lot easier if you're a programmer, but you don't need to be a programmer to automate things. Do you have bills that you pay every month? See if there are any that you can set up automatic recurring payments with. Do you have appointments you need to remember? Set them up in an online calendar with multiple reminders before and on the date of the appointment so you can prepare ahead of time. Even creating small habits is a form of automation. Place your wallet and keys in the same place every day and you'll have a much harder time losing or forgetting to grab either of them.
We're human beings. We're flawed creatures with a limited capacity to remember all of the things we need to remember. Because of this, human error caused by our flawed memory will inevitably--yes, inevitably--result in problems. The more we have to remember, the more likely it is that we'll forget something. By automating as much as we can, we free up our precious, small amounts of memory to focus on remembering the things we most need to remember when it's most critical. It's far easier, for example, to remember to drop your kid off at daycare if you're not focusing all of your mental energy on trying to remember that important task you were supposed to work on at work this week.
Do yourself a huge favor and take a little bit of time to set things up to make your daily life just a little bit easier.
The reminders and routines are good points. Be careful with this one though:
For recurring bills and subscriptions that are fixed (i.e. no potential fees or additions) like Netflix, this is great. For anything that may vary, getting into the habit of checking before paying every month can save you a lot of surprise hassle (e.g. unexpected phone data overage charges may be due to a misbehaving app, unusually high water bill could mean a leak, etc.). Problems are a lot easier to resolve before paying versus a noticing few months down the line, if it's even noticed at all.
That's an excellent point. It's always important to ensure that nothing sneaks up on you. There's a golden rule when it comes to automating a task: automate, but verify. There should always be a human somewhere in the process to ensure that the results are correct, and more often than not, that human will be you.
To be fair, though, you already have to pay your bills and you should be verifying your finances in the first place, anyway. The automatic payments simply free up your time and energy so you can focus more on the verification part of the process and less on the actual paying of the bills, ensuring that you only have to take an action when something is amiss.
Personally, I receive all of my bill statements via email. Whenever a statement is ready, I just review it real quick and, assuming everything looks correct, I simply exit my inbox and go back to whatever I was doing. I don't have to log into several different websites, manually click through multiple pages to make payments for each of them, and hope that I haven't somehow missed one--I just open a few emails and I'm done.
Granted, if you know you won't look at your inbox and see electronic statements or go out of your way to review your finances on a monthly basis, then paying manually may be a better option for you. That being said, you can still add in some other small automations to free up your head space, such as adding recurring payment reminders to your online calendar or keeping a spreadsheet that lists the various services you're paying for and little pieces of payment information like the payment amount and due dates.
The type of automation that works best for you will likely vary from person to person, and being aware of potential pitfalls like the one you brought up is part of making that judgement call. Regardless, having that automation in place is essential for making your life and finances easier to manage.
I wish I could do this, but nearly all of my local utility-type bills will only send me an email notification that my bill is ready. They won't say how much it is without me logging in or receiving a statement in the mail. I just have a calendar notification setup to go through everything once a month even though a few of the bills have automatic payments.
You are so right. I have a calendar reminder every month to go through my bills, and the variable bills are not set for automatic payment.
The over/under cord wrapping method is great. It's less prone to tangling, cords pull out straight, and it's less wear on the cords.
Don't save to the extent that you're not enjoying yourself in the moment, however. You don't need to go out every weekend and spend a hundred dollars on beer (I'd consider that wasteful), but saving every penny for a 'better future' if you're not enjoying yourself now isn't productive either. If that means every second month you buy yourself something you've been saving for, or you go on a short vacation once a year, that's okay. A good optimization would be to ensure you're happy now, and saving enough that you'll be even happier in the future.
Also, if possible, contribute to your 401k up to the percentage your company matches. It's leaving money on the table otherwise, and it helps boost those contributions, especially if you get started younger.
Even most of my retail jobs have offered a match, so it might be worth looking into even at early employment during high school/college.
Naive question; if you already have 401k, should you get a Roth to supplement it?
You can have both a 401k and a Roth IRA account. A Roth lets you invest in funds other than those your employer selects, besides the fact that it's another tax-advantaged way to save.
My ex-employer picked a relatively bad assortment of funds with higher fees. Since I've quit, I have the option to convert that 401k into a Roth IRA with better funds.
Roth or not really depends on how much you make and how much you intend to make when you retire. Roth means you pay taxes now, 401 means you pay taxes when you take it out.
Generally speaking, 401s tend to work out better if you use the money for the intended purpose only and don't start taking out money until you actually retire, because if your income is zero besides the stocks you sell, chances are your income in retirement is going to be significantly lower than your income when you are making money - putting the money into a 401 will reduce your currently taxable income today and the total taxes you pay on the income will be less when it's sold because it's not putting you into a higher bracket than you were paying when you put the money in.
can you elaborate on that? what do you consider low-cost and highly managed?
Keep a journal. It is okay to write only sporadically, the strictness don't matter. It'll help you deal with your troubles, helping you put yourself under your scrutiny.
There have been times when I felt really discouraged or depressed w.r.t. some issue or because of some event. Then I put some paper and started writing on it, unedited, no care for the quality of prose: basically a mix of a quarrel and a discussion with myself. Many times, at the end, I find that I've been horribly overcomplicating things or overblowing issues or being mad at stuff totally unnecessarily. And I can then go fix the situation easily, or at least get rid of the stress or the melancholy.
If you take a lot of notes and prefer pen & paper, a clipboard is way better than notebooks. You can use the same setup for any topic you need to take notes about, and can easily refill the thing with paper. You can also easily file stuff in appropriate containers or just scan w/o folding and harming the paper. It is also easier to just scrap stuff. I prefer using A5 paper for easy portability. I've been using A5 clipboards since 2014, and am still happy with that decision. Make sure it is one with a flapping cover which has a pocket for putting written papers in it, and preferably a pen holder (this is the one I have now and I really enjoy it).
If you write a lot, you may also enjoy a fountain pen: it is easier on your hand b/c the lower friction, costs less on the long run because a bottle of ink can be enough for very long times (I only used two bottles, one Pelikan and one Lamy, throughout uni, 4 years), is eco-friendly (less scrapped plastic throwaway pens), and you can use the same pen, with the identical experience, throughout your life. I've again started with this back in 2014, and am totally hooked. You don't need to write calligraphically, I just write with print letters most of the time.
This one's dirt simple: use hot dog buns instead of hamburger buns for messy, amorphous sandwiches. Sloppy Joes, pulled pork, that sort of thing.
Does that make them less messy?
With a round bun, a sloppy joe will often leak out of the sides. With a long bun (held with the split at the top), it "leaks" up, which is much more manageable.
Most self-help books have about a blog post's worth of content expanded to fill a book's worth of pages by endlessly reiterating its talking points, and by going over example after example. I've heard some people say the examples and repetition help them internalize the advice in the book, but if you're like me and find them to be completely unnecessary, you can save yourself the time, money, and shelf space by googling for a review of the book. Usually you can find one that explains the main concepts of the book.
There's only one self-help book that I wouldn't recommend you do this with, and it's called Time Management For Systems Administrators by Thomas Limoncelli. That's the only self-help book I've read where the author made every word count.
If you're reading something like a self-help book or textbook and need to read it quickly, or if you're reading it for fun but find it's a bit too boring and/or long for your tastes, don't read it word by word from cover to cover like you would a novel. Instead, go through chapter by chapter, reading just the intro and summary of to get a broad understanding of what it's trying to teach you. If it sounds interesting and you want more details, or if you don't quite grasp what it's saying, go through each section of that chapter reading the first and last paragraph or two. Usually the most important info will be in those paragraphs. If that's still not enough, you'll probably at least have a good idea of which sections seem important/interesting and be able to just skim or read those sections. Basically at every "level" of the book, read the beginning and ending of that level before deciding if you want to drill into its "sublevels" or continue to the next part of the "level" you're on.
But why is it easier? Presumably the force is the same. Is this because of less squeezing force on the lid and thus less friction between the lid and bottle?
I would assume since your whole hand can get a hold of the jar you can get more grip strength compared to the lid where it's just your fingertips?
Except you need a minimum amount of grip/friction to hold both the lid and jar anyways - so fingertips on their own won't cut it anyways (i.e. needs palm)
I just train judo and use my grip strength
1: Every single time you get out of the car, check the back seat. Do it even if you never have babies or kids in your car. Do it especially if you never have kids in your car. It's people who normally don't have kids in the car who are most likely to forget and leave the kid in the car in the unusual circumstance that they do have one in the car. Think it will never happen because you don't have kids? What about if a friend or relative asks you to drive their kid somewhere because of some emergency or unforeseen circumstances? Don't have friends or relatives who have kids? That could change. If you check every single time then you will check when the unexpected happens and you drive a kid somewhere. This has the added benefit that you also won't forget items you leave on the back seat.
2: Every time you lock a door or close a door that could be locked, physically check that you have the keys first. Never rely on thinking you have the keys. Either look at them, or feel them with you hand. Do it immediately before locking/closing the door. Check again even if you just checked a minute ago, but did anything or there was any time between checking and locking, so you don't check, set down your keys to do something, and then lock the door. This habit of always checking for the keys before locking the door has kept me from locking myself out multiple times.
In the vein of car things:
I disable the twist locks on the inside of my doors so that the only way to lock it is with the key. You can't lock your keys somewhere if you need the keys to use the lock in the first place. 100% foolproof.
If you don't own an AC unit, try freezing a bottle of water and put it infront of a fan.
Get rid of energy/time-consuming distractions.
I removed Reddit, Safari (blocked, actually), Chrome and the App Store from my cell phone, and asked a friend to set up a restrictions ("parental control") password to prevent me from circumventing those limitations.
I added the following to my
/etc/hosts:And changed my password to an annoying 30 characters phrase. But the constant need for admin access made me switch back. I also experimented with changing the permissions to my Emacs modules (tinkering is an addiction...), with some success.
I wanna install delayed admin, but it kinda changes how
sudoworks for the entire system and I'm scared of the time investment it might become.Overall, limiting my access to silly distractions has been very positive for me, and I strongly recommend. I'm seeing stuff instead of browsing the cellphone with the TV on. I'm watching anime again. Playing videogames. Last Sunday I went to a friends birthday and felt really engaged in the conversation. These little things make me happy. Most talk about getting rid of distractions focuses on productivity, but the main reason I made that change was to gain control of my leisure. Which, of course, has a direct impact on my productivity. But that's not the main point.
EDIT: forgot to say: if you're a computer geek like me, get acquainted with the off button! Set a cut-off time and follow through! If you use a laptop and the temptation is too strong, put it in the closet! I do that sometimes :P
If I want to mess with hosts on Android, would I need root or have to use a parental control app of some sort?
Since Android is Linux, it is quite possible that it has a hosts file. I have no idea how to proceed, though.
To my knowledge, you need to root your device.
I once had a need to modify the hosts file because I was maintaining a website that would route you to separate customer sections of the website based on the subdomain specified. The problem with a local build, of course, is that you don't have DNS pointing to it and you can't add a subdomain to an IP address, so you needed to modify your hosts file if you wanted to access different areas of the website. In trying to find out how to modify the hosts file on my Android device, it turned out that the task wasn't possible without rooting it first. This makes sense from a traditional Linux perspective, too--usually the hosts file is only writable by
root. You wouldn't want to allow just any user to be able to make changes to that file, after all.There are some potential DNS-related workarounds such as custom DNS servers or a VPN app that supports additional DNS configuration, but that's probably about it.
If you don't use a VPN, you can install an app that uses the VPN functionality to act like a custom /etc/hosts – the one I use is DNS66, but there are others.
That's cool, but I'm very focused in my addictions. Only a few sites draw my attention. I'll save it just in case, thanks ;)
I just wish there was some level beyond
rootso I could lock those files in it with an absurd 300 characters password lol.PiHole sounds like it may be a good solution for you. Throw it on a raspberry pi, route your computer's DNS through it, and add those domains to your blacklist. And then if you ever actually need access to those sites you can temporarily disable PiHole for a period of time. Think of it as (among other things) a network-wide hosts file.
Yes, it does. But wouldn't it also affect the other users in my household?
If you pointed your router's DNS to it, yeah. But if you just set your PC's, it'll just be on that device.
Pre-pay your utility bills to smooth them out.
Don't wait for the utility company (electricity, gas, water, internet, phone) to send your bill at the end of each month or each quarter, and then pay the amount in full. Instead, pre-pay in regular instalments.
Pay something - anything - regularly to your bills. Paying $20 each week to a utility company means $80 of your next month's bill is already covered. This works even better for quarterly bills. This reduces "bill shock". It smooths out your bills to match your pay cycle (if you get paid weekly, make bill payments each week; if you get paid fortnightly, pay each fortnight).
EDIT: Typo.
Ditch the landline and get a Google Voice Obihai box.
Edit: You are effectively plugging your physical phone into Google voice, which blocks robo callers, emails voicemail transcripts, offers low cost international calls etc...
I see you've posted a few comments in this thread... can you expand on them and actually explain & justify why they're worthwhile lifehacks, as opposed to just suggestions which can be helpful?
OK
I have one of these because we wanted a phone line tied to a physical address for emergency purposes but without paying a telecom too much for it. The rate is $25/year with Anveo plus the upfront cost of hardware. We would have been paying nearly that much per month for a landline through a telecom.
Write down a 5 year plan.
Set out long term goals for yourself. Review your progress in five years time. Check off items that were completed. If something was not completed, either cross it out or come up with a tangible action you can take to get you to your goal.
It is amazing how something so simple can be so motivating.
Ooooo I have a good one! Sitting at the bar of a restaurant when you have a party of 2 in order to skip a long wait. Having children seriously throws a wrench in this lifehack though.