I used to be a lifehacking addict, and in some ways I still am. I have a perverse love of systems and efficiency: analyzing, configuring, optmizing, categorizing, defining, and parameter-setting. I loved my first Palm Pilot, I read "Getting Things Done" over a Christmas break for fun, and I took a dickish kind of pride in replacing whatever corporate email solution a job might foist upon me with my own selfishly optimized system (damn the consequences for company security).

There was always a better way to do almost anything.

What follows is a personal essay from writer John Pavlus. It might seem strange seeing what could be read as a direct indictment of Lifehacker on Lifehacker, and while John assures us he bears us no ill will, we think he's offering an important reminder to evaluate what you're getting from your productivity obsession.

But sometime over the last couple years (around the time I turned 30, not coincidentally), it has begun to dawn on me: Maybe all the time I spend looking for better ways to do things is keeping me from, well, doing things.

It's like running on a treadmill: you might get in really good shape, I guess, but you never actually go anywhere.

This isn't some unique epiphany. In fact, the Head-Shaolin-Monk-For-Life of Lifehacking, Merlin Mann, said it first and probably best. But I'm writing my version because it's, well, mine — and because it's finally starting to sink in, in an actual, real-world, "changing the way I live" kind of way. And maybe you'll get something out of it, like I did from Merlin's.

What are you REALLY hacking?

They call it "lifehacking" and it's a damn catchy term. But it's also a misnomer in 9 out of 10 cases.

That's because most of the stuff that pours out of these sites isn't really about hacking your life. It's about constantly fiddling around with all the bullshit that too often gets in the way of your life:

• Email
• Paying bills
• Troubleshooting
• Syncing all your crap with all your other crap
• Remembering things that you tend to forget because they're boring/tedious/annoying in the first place

The "life-" part comes from the assumption that in our modern world, all this bullshit is a given — that you have to put up with it in large quantities. The "-hacking" part is there to assert that since you're going to spend a lot of your life putting up with this un-opt-outable bullshit anyway, you may as well fiddle around with said bullshit so that you can:

• give yourself some feeling of agency over its inescapable presence in your life, and
• maybe, if you're lucky, make it all stink a little less.

Kind of like how the Game Genie let you "hack" your boring old Nintendo cartridges back in the day so you wouldn't have to beat Worlds 1-1 through 8-3 all over again, every day, in exactly the same way every time you played. You could do it slightly differently (or faster, or "better") from time to time and that would make it all feel new again and you could feel kind of engaged again, even though it wasn't, really, and you weren't, really.

Essentially, this kind of "hacking" is all about trying to make the best of something that is:

• handed to you without your necessarily asking for it, and
• designed by someone else for someone else's benefit.

And it's a useful skill to have, no doubt. Hell if I'm gonna be stuck with what some corporate IT guy tells me I "have to" use for my email.

But is that really the way you want to think about your life?

Tweaking Your GTD System Is Easier Than Deciding What the Hell You Want to Do with Your Life

A lot of super-smart, talented folks really go down the rabbit hole with this lifehacking stuff. Why?

Maybe (like me) they just have a proclivity for that kind of thinking. (I won't deny that it's a lot of fun sometimes — like playing with a Rubik's cube.) Maybe they actually, truly find meaning in it, and in helping other people to find meaning in it (rare, I think, but possible). But in a lot of cases — also like mine — I think lifehacking is so seductive because it's simply easier than asking some bigger, harder, more important questions about where your time and attention go.

To return to the "hacking" analogy: it's just plain easier to tinker and tweak something you assume you're stuck with, for better or worse, than it is to design something better from scratch. It's less tiring. It's less frustrating. It's less frightening. It takes less commitment. There aren't any unknown unknowns. The failures are less painful and the successes are more frequent.

In short, the stakes are low. E.g.:

• If you don't conquer your inbox, it'll still be an annoyance that sort of stresses you out, but whatever - you're used to it, and hell, everyone else has the same problem, right?
• If you DO, hey, bonus! That aspect of the bullshit you have to deal with is a bit less annoying and stressful - for now, anyway - and you probably enjoyed a little morsel-feeling of control and satisfaction to boot. Maybe if you read that productivity blog more often, you'll get to have that feeling again.

No harm, no foul. Nice hack.

Meanwhile, here are the bigger questions you successfully avoided asking/answering:

1. Why do I get so much email in the first place?
2. How important is all that email to what I'm doing?
3. What AM I doing?

Hm… none of those questions be answered by installing a new browser plugin, and the mere act of asking them — much less answering them — raises the stakes rather uncomfortably. There you were harmlessly bitching about your email, and all of a sudden you're running headlong into, like, Life Stuff!

Here be dragons. Time to hit refresh on the ol' RSS reader and get back to safe ground. Come to think of it, I bet there's a better RSS reader I could be using…

Lifehack Recovery, Starting Now

So if lifehacking isn't the answer, and in fact may be obscuring meaningful questions, whaddya do? I'm not sure. That's why I refer to myself as a recovering lifehacker: It's still in progress for me, too. But here's some stuff I've learned that seems promising.

1. Less lifehacking, more life-designing.

   This has nothing to do with being artsy. It just means: start from scratch, question assumptions, and imagine outcomes. The point is that you envision what you want to do/be/happen first — not tools, process, defaults, or "what's possible." It's hard, but it clarifies what's real right up front, when it matters most. Timothy Ferriss might come off like some unholy combination of Tony Robbins and a meth addict, but his "4-Hour Workweek" book is a pretty unimpeachable object lesson in clearing away assumptions and redesigning one's life from first principles. But you don't have to be that radical. Just be less passive in all those subtle ways we all are, take responsibility, stop worrying about what other people might think, and own what happens to you. It changes the whole picture — big or small.

2. The best app/tool/gadget/hack for the job is the one you have with you.

   I adapted this notion from a bestselling photography book. Sound like settling? Nope. It just means keeping your tools and process in the proper perspective, namely: they are means to ends (see: #1), not ends in themselves. When you assume that what you've got in-hand, right now, is good enough, you stay focused on doing — not fiddling. Only when you discover that a particular tool or process is completely inadequate, or gets in your way more than it gets out of your way — and this will happen naturally, no fancy GTD system required — only then will you shift your attention to looking for a replacement. And even then, you'll be looking for something specific and practical, as opposed to just grazing for hours on the endless, incremental, six-of-one,-half-dozen-of-the-other type stuff that most productivity blogs spew out.

3. The least possible (practical) amount of organization is best.

   A good friend recently told me his whole working philosophy is based on laziness. But this guy is not lazy. He just realized that systems, categories, hierarchies, all the stuff that lifehackers nerd out on to keep chaos at bay — it all takes significant energy and attention to set up and maintain. And more often than we'd like to admit, that energy and attention doesn't translate into being more effective. In fact, above a certain threshold, imposing more order on a system detracts from its effectiveness.

   Consider a silverware drawer: I used to put knives, forks, spoons, etc. into their own separate compartments. But my wife just takes the clean silverware out of the dishwasher and dumps it into the drawer. It used to drive me nuts, until I realized her non-system didn't make grabbing a fork out of the drawer at dinnertime any more difficult; it was actually better, because I was no longer wasting time maintaining my useless silverware-categories (and wasting energy trying to convince her they were worthwhile!). In this case, "barely any organization at all" was just the right amount. Of course, if you pulled this stunt in a restaurant kitchen, you'd be screwed, but that system probably has its OWN least-practical-level of organization. Unclench the cheeks and get a little more comfortable with chaos — perversely, your life will get simpler.

4. You are very important, but only to certain people. Make sure you identify them correctly.

   Why do I check my inbox, twitter feed, smartphone notifications, and blog stats like a crack fiend? Because I really like feeling important. I like getting messages instantly because their manufactured urgency makes me feel like my attention is a hot commodity clamored for by thronging masses. And it's true: my attention is a hot commodity. But not to 95% of the people behind those dings and pings. They don't really care about me or my attention at all, other than as a means to their own ends. If I emailed them back right now, or two hours from now, tomorrow, never — it very well might make no real difference in the big picture. You know who does care about my attention? My wife. My friends (and not the Facebook variety). The family members I don't call often enough. To them, I actually am important. Why not act accordingly?

   I'm not saying you should just blow off your communication-related obligations at will, but being omni-available in "real time" should not be your default if you can help it. Let's be honest: The consequences of ignoring or deferring incoming messages until you're ready to review them are abstract and vastly overestimated, while the consequences of being that asshole who keeps checking his iPhone at dinner are very real. Yes, certain people should have the authority to interrupt you at will. But do consider this possibility: if the people to whom you've extended this privilege invoke it primarily via "things that ding," your priorities may be seriously fucked.

This Is Water

Lifehacking is fine — I don't mean to imply that it's a scourge like polio that should be stamped out for the overall good of the human race, or that the people who write productivity blogs are gremlins out to sap your lifeforce. They've turned me on to some great tools and tricks, and maybe I'll share them sometime. But the truth is that this kind of stuff is not going to help you figure out how to live well. And like a whole lot of other things in this world, it can actually hinder you if you're not careful.

The best book about work and productivity I ever read wasn't even about that, which is why you should read it if you care about this stuff. This is Water is short enough to be finished in 30 minutes, and the pedigree of its author ensures that you can read it in public without feeling like some sad-sack self-help junkie. I just re-read it myself, and here's the gist:

Life — the only one you get — consists of what you pay attention to. There is literally nothing else. The awesome thing (which I mean in the cosmic, Hubble Deep Field sense, not the "funny viral video" sense) is that no one gets to decide what you pay attention to except you. It seems easy, banal even; it's not. Learning how to do it — effectively, meaningfully, and relatively unselfishly — is pretty much the most profound thing you can attempt with the time you've got left. And there ain't no app for that.

Disclaimer: I've learned/cribbed all of this from the aforementioned book, Merlin Mann, and other sources I can't remember wel enough to link to. Also, just because I say I believe something is true and important doesn't mean I'm actually skilled at living that way. Yet.

Other disclaimer: I'm aware that "hacking" has a much different, and much more positive, historical connotation among programmers than the one I've employed above. This is a totally different subject and I'm not out to impugn any hackers, so please don't yell at me in the comments.

Confessions of a Recovering Lifehacker | John Pavlus

Want to see your work here? Send an email to submissions@lifehacker.com!

Photo by mangostock (Shutterstock).

New research shows that, with simple brain exercises, you may be able to actually increase your intelligence—something scientists previously thought impossible.

The proof is far from concrete yet, but quite a bit of new evidence suggests that your IQ may be more fluid than originally thought. A study done in 2008 tested children using a "Dual N-Back" game, in which you had to remember longer and longer sequences of things as the game continues, much like Simon (for you 80s kids out there). The researchers found that this game actually targets a fluid part of the brain:

. . .the deceptively simple game, it turns out, targets the most elemental of cognitive skills: "working" memory. What long-term memory is to crystallized intelligence, working memory is to fluid intelligence. Working memory is more than just the ability to remember a telephone number long enough to dial it; it's the capacity to manipulate the information you're holding in your head—to add or subtract those numbers, place them in reverse order or sort them from high to low. Understanding a metaphor or an analogy is equally dependent on working memory; you can't follow even a simple statement like "See Jane run" if you can't put together how "see" and "Jane" connect with "run." Without it, you can't make sense of anything.

In following studies, the researchers found that over time, children of all intelligence levels showed gains in cognitive abilities due to this "fluid" intelligence, and that these gains lasted three months after training stopped. Their theory is that your IQ, while partially genetic, is not unlike the muscles in your body—if you train it, and keep up that training over time, you can strengthen it. You can play a version of the Dual N-Back game for free, and while there's still a lot of research to be done on this subject, they say you only need 15 to 25 minutes a day, five days a week to see improvements. Hit the link to read the full story over at the New York Times. And, while they won't all necessarily increase your IQ, check out our top 10 other ways to train, exercise, and better your brain.

Can You Make Yourself Smarter? | New York Times Magazine

When you've got a lot going on, it's easy to overload your browser with loaded tabs you'll never get to, miss emails, open too many windows, and leave unfinished work in an app for days without realizing it. Computers are made to multitask but you're not. Here's how to train yourself to focus in an environment that's almost built for distraction.

Employ a "No Minimization" Rule to Force Yourself to React

Minimizing windows is a great way to build clutter you can't see. It's like letting bits of food or dirt drop on the floor with the assumption that you'll clean it up later. You may not notice it now, but next time you're looking at the floor of your home you'll see what you've actually been walking in. It's not a pleasant realization. While your computer isn't going to turn into a pile of dog hair, rice grains, and abandoned toenails, minimizing a ton of windows is similarly unappealing when it comes to your productivity. Minimizing a window often means "I can't deal with this right now" and that isn't a healthy attitude. You can deal with it now. The difference is that you just might have to make a tough decision about whether or not it's important. You may have an article on-screen that you want to read, but you may never actually read it. Let it go and close the tab. If you've got a document open in Word that you need to get done at some point but it's just been sitting in your task bar or dock for days, close it. Stop minimizing your work and start prioritizing instead. A group of minimized isn't a to-do list, but rather a list of things you're going to forget to do.

It'll be hard at first, but stop minimizing everything. (It's a good idea to avoid hiding apps as much as possible, too, though obviously you can't always do this.) You'll get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff on your screen but that's the point. It'll force you to need to keep things neat and tidy so you can find the work you actually have to do. You'll need to make tough decisions about what to close and what to keep at the ready, but with enough practice you can get to a place where you won't be bombarded by more stuff than you can handle.

Only Use One Window for Every Application

While there will be instances where you'll need to use more than one window in an application, such as when you're in your desktop email client and are also composing a message, you should avoid it whenever possible. The more crap you've got on your screen, the more likely you're going to get distracted. Keeping yourself to a single window can really help. While I was opposed to OS X Lion's full screen apps, I've been using them a lot to help me focus. While it's not effective for everything, it's great for some. It helps keep me to a single window in many apps and avoid distractions where I often find them. Of course, you don't need this feature to restrict yourself to a single window per app—you just need to do it. When you open up an extra window, close it (or close the existing window instead). This is a pretty simple concept, but if you're strict enough you should develop a good habit of opening only what you need after a few weeks.

Use a Single Monitor (or Give Your Second Monitor a Single Purpose)

If you haven't figured it out already, the theme of this post is "restrictions are good when you want to focus and get organized." Clutter is easier to see in smaller spaces, so if you're using multiple monitors and can never find anything there's a good sign that you should switch to a single monitor setup—at least until you get your clutter problem under control. If you're not ready to ditch your second monitor, give it a new and singular use. Make it a space for distracting communication like instant messages, or use it to hold your email. Make it do something that'll actually help you. Don't let it become a space to offload things you just can't deal with right now.

Create Intelligent Filters for Your Email Inbox and Set Rules for Dealing with Everything Else

I'm a big fan of the email white list, which essentially means using a filter to only allow specific senders into your inbox. This way you're only troubled with people you've designated as important rather than getting everything all at once. You can set up complex filtering rules to send other email to various secondary inboxes which you can then check when you have more time. (Setting up email filters will differ depending on what service or app you use, but here are instructions for Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, and Apple Mail.) Alternatively, if you're a Gmail user you can just sink your time into trying to make Priority Inbox do that job for you. In my experience, setting up filters tends to work better but I know Priority Inbox works really well for others. Your mileage may vary with either option.

Regardless of what you choose, you'll also need to set up some rules to govern the way you handle messages that do appear in your inbox. Some people find that it helps to set up tons and tons of folders (or labels, if you're a Gmail user) to help organize everything. Personally, I find this to take a lot more time than it's worth when you can just search for what you're looking for. If you want a simpler system that requires a little less effort, put together just a few folders/labels for the level of urgency of the message. If you need to respond immediately, just do that. For everything else, drop it in a folder/label that's named for its urgency. Soon, Within 24 Hours, This Week, and Eventually will do the trick (although know that anything that ends up in Eventually, and often times This Week, will probably not get a response). For the most part, if you honestly believe you're not going to have time to answer just archive the message. You can always go back to it later if it was important, but a lot of email isn't. You may want to check out a sale on SSDs later today, but if you don't really need one and know you'll likely forget, just archive the message. If it really matters, you'll go back and find it later.

Use a Desktop Triage System to Avoid Constant Screen Clutter

While it's hard to work with tons of window and email clutter, one of the worst things you can do is use your desktop as a file dump. If you have this problem, you need to take the time to solve it as soon as possible. It's hard to work when you can't find the files you need and you're looking at a ton of clutter every day. You're basically creating a visual representation of how you're overwhelmed. It may sound silly, but looking at a clean desktop can help you focus better because you're not staring at the problem all day long. If you've got the time, put some effort into designing a clean desktop that looks nice and avoids the clutter. If you don't have time, just grab a minimalist wallpaper and get started with this three icon desktop triage system to rid yourself of clutter in a few minutes.

Procrastination gets a bad rap, likely because we use it in excess. Putting too many things off is a problem, but the opposite isn't necessarily much better. Last year I managed to completely eradicate procrastination from my life, only to learn that it has its purpose. Sometimes putting things off until tomorrow is the healthiest choice you can make. Here's why.

Back in December of 2011, I implemented Seinfeld's productivity secret to help me get things done. It helped me prioritize all the things I wanted to do and I became more productive than I'd ever hoped. Suddenly I actually exercised every day, my apartment was impossibly clean, I'd written stories I'd put off for years, and finished several development projects that had been sitting on the back burner for even longer. Every day I'd accomplish a little more of each task and I'd get to put a big red X on the calendar. The process showed me how to get things done by making them a constant priority. It felt like I had a superpower—like there was more time in every day. It encouraged me to just get started, and it wasn't long before that red X on the calendar didn't matter anymore. If I made something a priority I'd just do it. I didn't need anything to motivate me other than the fact that I knew I could get it done, and that's where my problems began.

I realized this when I woke up one morning at 5:00 AM in a state of confusion that almost defies description. It seemed as though my subconscious was trying to process work I hadn't even thought of doing yet, and it took on everything at once. The moment I woke up I'd thought I was working, but I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it. It was as if ten tasks had formed to make one giant, completely non-sensical undertaking that had an indecipherable goal. After 30 minutes of trying to figure it out, I realized the problem: I'd made such a good habit out of getting things done that my brain didn't really understand anything else. I'd prioritized work, hobbies, exercise, chores, and even social activities. Every day was a puzzle where I'd try to fit together as many tasks as I could. I'd actually do them, go to sleep, and start up again the next day. There was no break. I'd completely neglected to prioritize one thing: nothing.

Our brains and bodies need quiet time where they're not doing anything at all. This doesn't mean zoning out in front of the television for an hour and it doesn't mean getting a full eight hours of sleep per night. It means setting aside time to process the events of the day, and perhaps the days before. It means letting your brain rid itself of all the excess thought you've accumulated from constantly doing. For some, meditation might work. For me, I've started taking a walk before the sun goes down. Most of my work is done indoors, so the change of scenery is calming and helpful. Walking alone, with no company from another person or the stimulation of music, a podcast, or anything else, gives my brain the time it needs to let go of any excess thoughts it had been carrying around. The activity, itself, is mostly irrelevant. The important aspect of the activity is that it is boring. It is that lack of stimulation that's important. Brains need breaks, too.

This isn't a new concept. It's something people have known and rediscovered for many more years than any of us have been alive. It's also something that's easy to forget, especially in the face of the pleasure of accomplishment. Just because we have the time and the ability doesn't mean we're obligated to use it do get something done. What's possible isn't always right. Sometimes what can be put off until tomorrow should be something rather than nothing at all.

Photo by tjeffersion (Shutterstock) and Andresr (Shutterstock).