Life hack
Trick to make life easier
A life hack (or life hacking) is any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty Improvisation that increases productivity and efficiency in all walks of life. The term was primarily used by computer experts who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow in ways other than programming.
01Overview
The term life hack was coined in 2004 during the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California by technology journalist Danny O'Brien to describe the "embarrassing" scripts and shortcuts productive IT professionals use to get their work done. It is used to describe an inelegant but effective solution to a specific computing problem, such as quick-and-dirty shell scripts and other command line utilities that filtered, munged and processed data streams like e-mail and RSS feeds. O'Brien stated "Hacks are often a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix. And for most people, geeks or not, modern life is just this incredibly complex problem amenable to no good obvious solution. But we can peck around the edges of it; we can make little shortcuts.
O'Brien and blogger Merlin Mann later co-presented a session called "Life Hacks Live" at the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. The two also co-authored a column entitled "Life Hacks" for O'Reilly's Make magazine which debuted in February 2005.
The American Dialect Society voted lifehack (one word) as the runner-up for "most useful word of 2005" behind podcast. The word was also added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online in June 2011.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Life hack”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Modified keyboard (16372763).jpg by Jonathan Aquino from Victoria BC, Canada, CC BY 2.0
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