Today I’m writing about a quite popular topic. At least it seems popular to me, because lots of my friends and many people whose postings I follow have mentioned it once or even regularly. I’m talking about so called life hacking literature. But in my opinion using the term life hacking is confusing and misconcepted. It promises to just fix all your problems by some easy to use “hacks”. As a software developer talking about hacks, isn’t very serious at all. A hack is just the ugly little sister of a beautiful solution. So I think it’s ways better to talk of productivity literature. At least who wants his life to be puzzled and glued together by lots of hacks. From nothing nothing comes!
Some time ago I myself wasn’t into these sort of books. Thinking about this subject bubbled up some strange associations onto my mind. It felt like something between spiritual new age philosophies mixed with a self-help group, finally bound to a paperback. So I never felt the need, to get in touch with those kind of books. But as you can see one day I changed my mind.
I became curious, because many people I appreciate started to read these lousy books. There were hundreds of different topics for several fields of life. As a sceptic I focused on subjects I am familiar with. Programming and creativity for example. I started out with The Passionate Programmer (Chad Fowler), followed by The Creative Habit (Twyla Tharp) and finished with an almost classic: The Power of Less (Leo Barbauta). This is not going to be a detailed review, because there are pretty enough recensions on Amazon or even on the net already. I’m more about to point out the similarities of these three and why each book is worth to be read.
All these books are about methodologies. They don’t promise worlds to you nor do they polish up your ego with bold shiny lies. Nearly the opposite case can be found here. Forseen of some exceptions the concepts seem very down to earth to me and are applicable for software developers as well as for designers or students.
The authors are writing about focus, serious work, skill training and skill development. Especially repetition is one of the major concepts. This may seem pretty boring to the most of us. But you definitely shouldn’t underestimate the value of good work habits. And habits can be developed the best, by doing tasks consciously and often. Just do them consequently for a while and chances are good, that even unbeloved tasks (like paper works, cleaning, rising up early in the morning) may feel comfortable soon. This type of conditioning also helps you to develop habits you don’t have to think or care about later. Managing your document folders for example. If you’re once are used to file them right away, you’ll never have to search for them later.
Well now. I didn’t want to start up yet another life hacker productivity blog, as there are yet enough of them on the net. This book tips just shall be my two cent to the nowadays global productivity movement. I especially enjoyed The Passionate Programmer because to be a developer is my passion, too. This book delivers many interesting positions on what defines a good coder and how to develop important (language independent) engineering skills.
I like The Creative Habit for inspiring me much when it comes to see creativity as a habit which wants be trained regularly. Even the rituals chapters were very interesting. But you’ve to bring in some stamina, because Twyla Tharp writes about and compares a lot with ballet/dancing/classics. Yet another interesting subject Twyla writes about is the loss of skills. Which skill would define you, if you would have lost you current major skill. Ever thought about that one?
The Power of Less seems to be a quite good instruction set, if you’re unhappy with your current way of organizing things. So if you seek guidance out of your personal office mess this book may be the right one for you.
