The Life and Times of Elliot Pike

Let me start out with a disclaimer: I know next to nothing about the true intention of the term “Life Hack” beyond what is described in (my favorite reference tool) the Wikipedia. On the other hand I have read the David Allen bestselling book Getting Things Done and tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to incorporate it into my own life.

A get the feeling that “Life Hack” has become a misappropriated term, at least in the sense that people have turned it from the study of geek tools (namely, quick and dirty computer scripting) to a generalized, faddish Self Help buzzword. My friend who goes by the moniker “Spadzoot” once wrote a bit of a polemic about this particular craze. And I have to agree, to a point, with his assessment. The website 43Folders is a website whose audience is interested in applying the methodologies of the “Getting Things Done” book into their personal workflow systems. For a while I was keeping tabs on 43Folders, but a lot of the postings were becoming downright silly, and I saw the community mostly as a bunch of people who had drunk a little bit too much of the Kool Aid.

That being said, I have to disagree with Spadzoot’s assertion that the entire pursuit is a complete waste of time and energy. (I did love his anecdote about the ridiculous “Time Management” seminar he attended at work, and I think if you read it you’ll understand the brunt of his frustration.)

Let me break everything down by starting with a single personal truism and branching out from there: I am not happy with my current life. There is a pretty long list of things I’m not thrilled about, some of them temporary and immediate, others chronic:

1. (Immediate) I’m still unemployed and slogging through job-search Hell.
2. I have never been in a long-term relationship.
3. I tend to slip quickly and easily into “hermit” mode, losing touch with friends and resulting in a nonexistent social life.
4. I’m physically out of shape and about 10-15 overweight. (For where I want to be.)
5. 95% of the time my home is a mess, enough for me to be too embarrassed to invite friends over.
6. I have zillions of unfinished “projects” of all shapes and sizes. Some of them are silly personal pet projects and others are pretty major things that I’m truly embarrassed about having left unfinished. (This website being one of them.)

There is a myriad of reasons for these problems. For one thing, I would call myself “A.D.D.”—whether officially or unofficially. Cleaning my home is hard not because I’m lazy, but within five minutes my mind is elsewhere—I’m daydreaming or brainstorming—and before I know it I’m no longer cleaning but researching some programming technology on the web or studying some nuance of Constitutional Law or searching for some recipe I would like to try out. And most of these diversions lead me to pulling some book or trinket out, and suddenly my place is getting more messy. For another thing, I think I suffer (unofficial and/or undiagnosed) from depression, and it’s easier to indulge in any diversion that distracts me from fixing my life. The desire to procrastinate or simply avoid far exceeds the endorphin-high of being physically fit or the personal satisfaction of having and maintaining a clean home.

This isn’t to say I’m resolved to stewing and being miserable. To my credit, I’ve put myself on track for improving my life in a few ways. Moving back to New York has vastly improved my social life, and I’ve actually been (ohmygawd!) dating with some regularity. I’m actively working on improving my resume and directing my job searching away from just the easiest jobs I’m likely to land quickly toward a career path that will bring me more job satisfaction. I guess I could say that I know a lot of my own worst habits and can sometimes force myself into a situation where I’m in a slightly better vantage point to succeed.

And that’s where all of a sudden the term “Life Hacking” takes on a profound meaning for me. (And once again, I fully admit I’m misappropriating the term from its original usage.) I’m a geek—a life-long computer programmer. I’m also a Mathematician and tend to break things down into models. My life behaviors follow certain unmistakable patterns, ones that tend to lead me away frommy most desired [lifestyle] outcomes.

When a computer program is broken, there are essentially two things you can do. The most obvious one is to fix it. You rewrite the sections of code that were ill-conceived, or in a worse-case-situation you rewrite the thing from scratch. This can be impossible if you don’t have access to the source code, as is always the case with commercial software, or if the underlying code is too complex a system. Let’s quickly jump out of the metaphor and back into life: short of some miracle Hypnosis or years of therapy (and possibly some anti-A.D.D. medication and/or anti-depressives) I simply can’t rewrite my personality and make it all better.

So where does that leave me? Albert Einstein is credited with defining insanity as “doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome.” If I want to change something in my life (as I do) and my normal behavioral patterns tend to lead me in the wrong direction, what do I do? Answer: I have to Hack my life. I have to look at my life—and as I said before, I’m a Mathematician so I see things as models and algorithms—and figure out some “tricks” or experiments, see if they work, and if they do I need to figure out how to make them more permanent.

Life Hacking. Hacking life.

Let me give one very simple, concrete example of a successful hack, at least when I choose to implement it.

Problem

When I get busy I tend not to think about my diet. When I get hungry I tend to eat the thing that will satisfy my appetite the quickest and most completely. That usually means I eat total crap. I almost never eat vegetables—especially if I’m preparing my own food, which happens a lot right now because I’m unemployed. For example, I was working on a project over the last week, something that might possibly lead to getting temporary employment for at least a few months, and I was in crunch-mode. What did I eat? Top Ramen. Why? Because I could prepare it in five minutes and keep my concentration on the computer code I’m writing.

Solution

Okay, this is going to sound completely silly, but have you seen those little plastic-ware containers they sell in the grocery store? They’re called “TakeAlongs” by Rubbermaid, and they are intended to be single-serving containers. There’s one in particular that is sub-divided so you can put different food in different sections. Well, back in L.A. I learned that I could cook up something big on Sunday, like a large Salmon filet and some rice and mixed vegetables. I could then put a portion of each in one of these containers and have lunch for the rest of the week, and I mean a good, healthy, tasty lunch. Yeah, I know that the same thing every day can get monotonous, but when I’m “in the zone” and busy focusing on work, I don’t care what I’m eating.

Now I’m not saying that this little Life Hack is profound. I’m sure it wouldn’t work for most people. Hell, most people these days simply don’t cook. But for me, when I do it, I eat much better. I mention it here not because I think it’ll change anyone else’s life. It’s just here as an example. I started doing it again just yesterday, and in fact in the middle of writing this blog post I had some nice leftover homemade Mexican Rice and a Burrito—I put the beef ‘n beans and diced tomatoes in the container for reheating, folded it into a tortilla and fixed a proper fresh burrito—not one of those tasteless bricks you get in frozen foods section of the grocery store.

Anyway, I think it’s high time I kicked my life into gear. Much of the past six weeks has been me sitting around the apartment, unemployed, in my bathrobe, puttering around and accomplishing very little. (Okay, last two weeks were productive with this programming project, but my apartment is still a mess.) As a means of focusing myself on Getting Stuff Done, I think I’m going to write some blog entries on my own Life Hacking process. I even created a new Wordpress subcategory (under “Life”) called Hacking Life, and this is its introductory post.

One last observation before I sign off: my entire web log was a Life Hack of its own. (Originally this blog was on my personal non-pen-name website and I’ve kept it up, with some long dry-spells, since 2003.) I started it because I had noticed that years of my life were passing without my marking any significant accomplishments, and what’s more, I sometimes couldn’t account for entire years because I’d been lost in a rut of just going through the motions of life. Once I started blogging I managed some major accomplishments, like finally getting into the Screen Actors Guild and finally completing a long-abandoned Masters Degree in Statistics. Yes, this blog was one of my original modern Life Hacks.