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9 Tips For Better Sleep

March 24th, 2010 | No Comments


This article is the 4th in the 6-part series, Lifehack Challenge: Become An Early Riser In 5 Days. If you’d like to join, leave a comment that includes your promised wake-up time. The hard part is actually getting out of bed!

Whenever I see a toddler or small animal sleeping in a ridiculous position, a little part of me gets terribly jealous. Not because I want to be a small child or a furry kitten. Because I want to enjoy that same sort of rest!

I had a lot of trouble sleeping a few years back. Through a lot of experimentation and a bit of help from some very cool experts, I was able to take charge of my sleep and learn how to not just sleep, but find true rest.

At first glance, most of the tips listed below will seem familiar to you. They’re straightforward, simple ways to get better sleep. It’s okay if you’ve seen them before. The question is, have you actually put them into practice since the last time you saw them?

Hmm?

If not, let’s have another try and maybe get some better sleep tonight!

1. Learn your sleep position

Your “sleep position” is the position you always move into right before falling asleep. If I’m not very tired I’ll spend some time on my back, stomach, or other scenario until I feel like sleeping. Then, as soon as I feel like sleeping, I move onto my side and get down to sleeping business. Once you know your sleep position you can move into it immediately once you get into bed. Take a few deep breaths, relax, and your body will assume that it’s time to sleep and you’ll be drooling on your pillow in no time.

2. Create a sleep ritual

Not unlike your morning ritual, a sleep ritual is a few things you always do before going to sleep. Do you brush your teeth (you should be), listen to a bit of some favorite song, or stretch for a few minutes before bed? Figure out what helps you relax and make a habit of doing those things every time before you plan to sleep. You’ll soon find it’s easier to rest, even in circumstances that otherwise might have kept you awake, because the rhythm of your sleep ritual has lulled you into a relaxed state.

3. Build a sleep cocoon

Please don’t start spinning silk and wrapping yourself up to sleep. If you can actually do that, your problems are much bigger than a simple lack of sleep! (Do spiders sleep? Anyone?) What you should try is creating a “cocoon” of silence and cool darkness that makes it easier for you to sleep. Experiment a bit with earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones to counteract the loud neighbors, air conditioning or a fan, and a blackout curtain to keep the street lights from keeping you awake at night. You know your situation best. Now optimize it so you can sleep better!

4. Experiment with naps

You could take an extreme and try polyphasic sleep (been there, really hard to get started, kinda fun once you’ve got a groove going) which is only naps. I’d recommend something more along the lines of a quick cat nap in the afternoon when you’re feeling tired. Napping doesn’t work for everybody. In fact, it might make it harder for you to sleep at night! The easiest way to find out if an afternoon nap will work to help you get the best rest is to try napping over a weekend and see how you feel afterward. Keep it under 30 minutes long and you should be able to avoid the bewildering effects of longer naps. There’s always the caffeine nap, but that might conflict with the next tip.

5. Skip the late-afternoon caffeine

If caffeine can affect you for up to 8 hours after consumption, what are you doing sucking down coffee at 8pm? Skip the caffeine in favor of a tall glass of water and a few minutes of aerobic exercise. You don’t need to put on a purple leotard and dance in the hallway. A few flights of stairs in your normal clothes should do the trick.

6. Maintain a sleep schedule

“Get up at the same time every morning and go to sleep at the same time every night” says the Mayo Clinic. Seriously? Life rarely allows such a luxury as that! If you’re not one of the few who can arrange their schedule around sleep, do your best by keeping your sleep and wake times within an hour at each end. For example, if you can get to bed between 11pm-midnight and wake up between 7am-8am, a few minutes given or taken each day shouldn’t be a problem in the long run.

7. Go to directly to bed when you’re tired

You know what happens when you start to feel tired and decide to stay up for just a few minutes answering emails: you get a second wind and end up watching Youtube videos until 3am and paying for it the following day. Enough! If you’re within an hour of your normal bed time and you’re feeling tired, go to bed and try to sleep. Anything else is a waste of your time and future productivity.

8. Have clean bedding you love

“Love” might be too strong a word. It’s hard to find anybody other than a mattress salesperson who sounds passionate about a mattress. That doesn’t mean your bedding doesn’t matter though. The clean part, which results from laundering your sheets and pillowcases, matters very much though. Who doesn’t like the smell and feel of freshly clean sheets? (Put your hand down. That’s gross.) Take a look at your pillow, too. If it’s old and the filling is clumping up, it might be time to treat yourself to a new one.

9. Exercise early, don’t eat late

Two tips in one? What a deal! There are some who can exercise right before bed and not have it affect their sleep. If you’re one of those, good for you. If not, consider exercising when you get up in the morning as a healthy way to get your day off to a running start. Exercise, amazingly enough, can also work well to fight off the fatigue you feel after sitting in an office chair all day. Turn away from the coffee and get moving! You might associate eating with feeling sleepy because of the “carb coma” you get after a big meal. Take a break from the late-night stuffing and focus on relaxing instead. Perhaps a glass of wine? That’d be nice.

Any thoughts or tips you’d like to add? Fire away!

If you’re participating in this week’s Early Riser Challenge, you’ll want to check out reader blogs: PeterxPark, TinaRenee, and LiveLighter.

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I’m an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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Do You Have A Morning Ritual?

March 23rd, 2010 | No Comments


This article is the 3rd in the 6-part series, Lifehack Challenge: Become An Early Riser In 5 Days. If you’d like to join, leave a comment that includes your promised wake-up time. The hard part is actually getting out of bed!

Do you have a morning ritual? For years my grandfather started his day the exact same way. At 4:30am he’d wake, put on his bathrobe, walk to the kitchen and put two eggs on to boil. Then he’d put on a pair of slippers (or boots in the winter) and walk to the end of his very long driveway to pick up the day’s newspaper.

When he arrived back at the kitchen, he’d pour the boiling water off the eggs to make coffee. (Kinda gross, but it worked for him.) By the time the coffee was ready, the eggs had cooled enough to eat with a slice of well-jammed bread as he read the entire paper.

This week’s challenge is about rising early. But more than rising early, it’s about rediscovering productivity at the start of your day. You need not wake at the crack of dawn in order to have a productive start to your day. But you do need to take a close look at how you start your day and figure out how to get more from it. Establishing a morning ritual is one good way to do just that.

Why a Morning Ritual?

A morning ritual is something you do every day as part of your morning. My grandfather enjoyed egg water coffee over a newspaper as part of his morning ritual. You might enjoy yoga, singing ABBA tunes at the top of your lungs, or sipping coffee in quiet reverie. What you choose to do doesn’t matter as much as why you do it and what you get out of doing it repeatedly. There are some specific benefits to maintaining a morning ritual:

  • A morning ritual gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. We all need something to get out of bed for! Once you’ve found the right mix of action and stillness, sound and silence that gets your day off to a perfect start you’ll never want to miss out on your ritual.
  • It becomes as much a habit as getting out of bed at a certain time. Your alarm goes off and there’s no need to think about what you’ll do next. You simply do what you always do.
  • Starting your day with a few simple tasks is an easy way to begin a cycle of results that’ll power you through your day. Something as small as a nicely made bowl of oatmeal may not seem like a big accomplishment until you’re having a hard day and realize that going through the motions of your morning ritual makes the day easier.
  • Your morning ritual will help you enjoy the luxury of time you’ve given yourself by rising at an appropriate time. (Notice I didn’t say “early.” You might be working on an evening ritual!)
  • A morning ritual is entirely about you. Sure, you’ll have to deal with other people at some point in your morning. If you’re lucky, you’ll get at least a few minutes of time just for you. This is your chance to center yourself and embrace your day instead of fleeing before it.

Once you’ve decided that you’d like to have a more structured morning ritual, you’ll want to set aside some time to experiment with what works best for you. The easiest way to get such a block of time is by waking a bit earlier than you would otherwise.

Getting Started

Getting started with a morning ritual isn’t especially difficult because we each have things we’re already doing every morning. The thing to keep in mind with a morning ritual is that you’re hoping to achieve a certain state of mind in going through the motions of your morning.

5 Steps to putting your morning ritual into place:

  1. Draft a short list of the things you do each morning and what you’d like to add.
  2. Figure out how much time it’ll realistically take to do everything on your list.
  3. Adjust your wake time to accommodate your new ritual.
  4. Go through your list each morning for at least 2 mornings before making adjustments.
  5. Once your adjustments are made, enjoy!

You can use these steps no matter what your perfect wake time. It might be good to have your list handy until you can get everything done through your brain’s early morning fog without issue. If part of your ritual involves exercise, that fog won’t stay around for long!

Then What?

Once you have the basics of your morning ritual in place, it’s time to optimize for increased productivity. Is there a personal project you’d like to get a head start on with a few minutes of focused attention each morning? Do you want to write a book, learn a foreign language, correspond via snail mail, or build a blog? We all know the value of putting time each day toward reaching a certain goal. The rhythm of your morning ritual will lend itself to daily participation in projects you might never get around to otherwise.

Remember when you’d rush out of bed, barely shower, and head out the door on your way to work without noticing the world around you? Those stressful starts can be gone for mostly-ever if you’re willing to put the time and effort into creating a morning ritual that adds joy to your day. That’s what lifehacks are supposed to be about anyhow, yes? Figuring out the shortest path to a better life? I hope so.

If you have any tips to add or even a summary of your morning ritual, we’d love to read it!

Here are a few links to readers blogging about their Lifehack Challenge experience.

Want your blog included in an upcoming article? Make sure to include a link in your comment. I’ll pick a few to share with tomorrow’s post.

Follow Lifehack on Twitter here

Image: source

I’m an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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Do You Have A Morning Ritual?

March 23rd, 2010 | No Comments


This article is the 3rd in the 6-part series, Lifehack Challenge: Become An Early Riser In 5 Days. If you’d like to join, leave a comment that includes your promised wake-up time. The hard part is actually getting out of bed!

Do you have a morning ritual? For years my grandfather started his day the exact same way. At 4:30am he’d wake, put on his bathrobe, walk to the kitchen and put two eggs on to boil. Then he’d put on a pair of slippers (or boots in the winter) and walk to the end of his very long driveway to pick up the day’s newspaper.

When he arrived back at the kitchen, he’d pour the boiling water off the eggs to make coffee. (Kinda gross, but it worked for him.) By the time the coffee was ready, the eggs had cooled enough to eat with a slice of well-jammed bread as he read the entire paper.

This week’s challenge is about rising early. But more than rising early, it’s about rediscovering productivity at the start of your day. You need not wake at the crack of dawn in order to have a productive start to your day. But you do need to take a close look at how you start your day and figure out how to get more from it. Establishing a morning ritual is one good way to do just that.

Why a Morning Ritual?

A morning ritual is something you do every day as part of your morning. My grandfather enjoyed egg water coffee over a newspaper as part of his morning ritual. You might enjoy yoga, singing ABBA tunes at the top of your lungs, or sipping coffee in quiet reverie. What you choose to do doesn’t matter as much as why you do it and what you get out of doing it repeatedly. There are some specific benefits to maintaining a morning ritual:

  • A morning ritual gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. We all need something to get out of bed for! Once you’ve found the right mix of action and stillness, sound and silence that gets your day off to a perfect start you’ll never want to miss out on your ritual.
  • It becomes as much a habit as getting out of bed at a certain time. Your alarm goes off and there’s no need to think about what you’ll do next. You simply do what you always do.
  • Starting your day with a few simple tasks is an easy way to begin a cycle of results that’ll power you through your day. Something as small as a nicely made bowl of oatmeal may not seem like a big accomplishment until you’re having a hard day and realize that going through the motions of your morning ritual makes the day easier.
  • Your morning ritual will help you enjoy the luxury of time you’ve given yourself by rising at an appropriate time. (Notice I didn’t say “early.” You might be working on an evening ritual!)
  • A morning ritual is entirely about you. Sure, you’ll have to deal with other people at some point in your morning. If you’re lucky, you’ll get at least a few minutes of time just for you. This is your chance to center yourself and embrace your day instead of fleeing before it.

Once you’ve decided that you’d like to have a more structured morning ritual, you’ll want to set aside some time to experiment with what works best for you. The easiest way to get such a block of time is by waking a bit earlier than you would otherwise.

Getting Started

Getting started with a morning ritual isn’t especially difficult because we each have things we’re already doing every morning. The thing to keep in mind with a morning ritual is that you’re hoping to achieve a certain state of mind in going through the motions of your morning.

5 Steps to putting your morning ritual into place:

  1. Draft a short list of the things you do each morning and what you’d like to add.
  2. Figure out how much time it’ll realistically take to do everything on your list.
  3. Adjust your wake time to accommodate your new ritual.
  4. Go through your list each morning for at least 2 mornings before making adjustments.
  5. Once your adjustments are made, enjoy!

You can use these steps no matter what your perfect wake time. It might be good to have your list handy until you can get everything done through your brain’s early morning fog without issue. If part of your ritual involves exercise, that fog won’t stay around for long!

Then What?

Once you have the basics of your morning ritual in place, it’s time to optimize for increased productivity. Is there a personal project you’d like to get a head start on with a few minutes of focused attention each morning? Do you want to write a book, learn a foreign language, correspond via snail mail, or build a blog? We all know the value of putting time each day toward reaching a certain goal. The rhythm of your morning ritual will lend itself to daily participation in projects you might never get around to otherwise.

Remember when you’d rush out of bed, barely shower, and head out the door on your way to work without noticing the world around you? Those stressful starts can be gone for mostly-ever if you’re willing to put the time and effort into creating a morning ritual that adds joy to your day. That’s what lifehacks are supposed to be about anyhow, yes? Figuring out the shortest path to a better life? I hope so.

If you have any tips to add or even a summary of your morning ritual, we’d love to read it!

Here are a few links to readers blogging about their Lifehack Challenge experience.

Want your blog included in an upcoming article? Make sure to include a link in your comment. I’ll pick a few to share with tomorrow’s post.

Follow Lifehack on Twitter here

Image: source

I’m an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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5 Tips For Becoming An Early Riser

March 22nd, 2010 | No Comments


This article is the 2nd in the 6-part series, Lifehack Challenge: Become An Early Riser In 5 Days. If you’d like to join, leave a comment that includes your promised wake-up time. We’d make participation more complex but you’ll have enough on your hands trying to get out of bed in the morning!

If you’d like to become an early riser, there are some things you should know before you run off to set your oft-ignored alarm clock. Here are five tips I’ve discovered to be most helpful in making the transition from erratic sleeper to early morning wizard:

1. Choose to get up before you go to sleep

You’re not very good at making decisions when you’ve just woken up. You were in the middle of a dream in which [insert celebrity crush of choice here] is serving you breakfast in bed only to be rudely awakened by the harsh tones of your alarm clock. You’re frustrated, angry, confused, and surprised. This is not the time to be making decisions about whether or not you should stay in bed! And yet, most of us leave the first decision of our day to be made in a blur of partial wakefulness.

No more! If you want to be a consistently early riser, try making your decision to rise at a specific time before you go to sleep the night before. This frees you from making the decision in the morning when you’ve just woken up. Instead of making a decision, you have only to follow through on your decision from the night before. Easier said than done? Of course. But only for the first few times. Eventually your need for raw willpower to get out of bed will diminish and you’ll be the proud parent of a new habit!

Steve Pavlina suggests you practice getting out of bed during the day to get a few of the “practice sessions” out of the way without the early morning fog in your head.

2. Have a plan for your extra time

Let’s say you’ve actually made it out of bed 2 hours before you normally would. Now what? What are you going to do with all this time you’ve discovered in your day? If you don’t have something planned to do with your extra time, you risk falling for the temptation of a “morning nap” that wipes out all the work you put into getting up.

What to do? Before you go to bed, make a quick note of what you’d like to get done during your extra hours the following day. Do you have a book to write, paper to read, or garage to clean? Make a plan for your early hours and you’ll do more than protect yourself from backsliding into bed. You’ll get things done and those results will fuel your desire to build rising early into a habit!

3. Make rising early a social activity

While there’s obvious value in joining a Lifehack Challenge in order to get you started as an early riser, your internet buddies just don’t have enough pull to make your new habit stick in the long term. The same cannot be said for the people you spend time with as part of your early morning routine.

Sure, you could choose to read blogs for two hours every morning. But wouldn’t it be great to join an early breakfast club, running group, or play chess in the park at 5am? The more people you get involved in making your new habit a daily part of your life, the easier it’ll be to succeed.

4. Don’t use an alarm that makes you angry

If we’re all wired differently, why do we all insist on torturing ourselves with the same sort of alarm each morning? I spent years trying to wake up before my alarm went off so I wouldn’t have to hear it. I got pretty good, too. Then I started using a cellphone as my alarm clock and quickly realized that different ring tones irritated me less but worked just as well to wake me up. I now use the ring tone alarm as a back up for my bedside lamp plugged in to a timer.

When the bright light doesn’t work, the cellphone picks up the slack and I wake up on time. The lesson learned? Experiment a bit and see what works best for you. Light, sound, smells, temperature, or even some contraption that dumps water on you might be more pleasant than your old alarm clock. Give something new a try!

5. Get your blood flowing right after waking

If you don’t have a neighbor you can pick fights with at 5am you’ll have to settle with a more mundane exercise. It doesn’t take much to get your blood flowing and chase the sleep from your head. Just pick something you don’t mind doing and go through the motions until your heart rate is up. Jumping rope, push-ups, crunches, or a few minutes of yoga are typically enough to do the trick. (Just don’t do anything your doctor hasn’t approved.)

If you live in a beautiful part of the world like me, you might want to use a bit of your early morning to go for a walk and enjoy the beauty of the world around you. If you have a coffee shop open within walking distance, dragging yourself out of bed for a cup of coffee to savor on your walk home as the world wakes around you is a wonderful experience. Try it!

Do you have a tip to add? I look forward to reading it!

Challenge participants: If you’re a part of this week’s Lifehack Challenge, make sure to leave a comment telling us how your first try at rising early went. Also, if you’re blogging your experience and have some tips about becoming an early riser that the rest of us would enjoy, make sure you leave a link to your post!

Image: source

I’m an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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Lifehack Challenge: Become An Early Riser In 5 Days

March 20th, 2010 | No Comments


You’ve read the articles and heard about all the benefits of rising early. On the rare occasion that found you out of bed early, you enjoyed a more relaxing and productive morning. You don’t need to be convinced that being an early riser is a good thing.

You just need to actually do it. You need to start getting up early on a regular basis and building the early riser habit into your lifestyle.

Lifehack is here to help you do just that! A Lifehack challenge make sense for a few reasons:

  • You can do anything for 5 days.
  • It’s much easier to do something hard when you have friends along.
  • A bit of accountability goes a long way in the forming of new habits.

So what’s the challenge?

Be an early riser for 5 days in a row.

When does the challenge take place?

We’ll be starting on the morning of March 22 and ending after you get out of bed on March 26th.

Sound interesting? Here’s what you need to do:

Leave a comment confirming your participation in the early riser challenge and include your target wake time for each morning.

For example: “Yeah, count me in! I’ll be waking up 3hrs earlier than usual each day so 9am it is for me!”

If you’re going to be blogging about your challenge experience, make sure to include a link to your blog when you leave a comment. Why? Because I’ll be choosing a few blogs to feature in an update/check-in post each day. Once you have your day well underway, you can stop by the daily update post and share your thoughts on what went well and what you’re struggling with. I’ll be sharing tips, featured blogs, and questions in a daily post you can look for each morning.

If we do this as a community, and I say “we” because I’ll be doing it myself as well (I’ve been slacking off on my early mornings lately), we’ll get better results and have more fun. At the end of the week, if you decide early rising isn’t for you, no harm done and you’ll have made some new friends from all across the world!

Sounds good, right?

Leave a comment below (with wakeup time) if you’re up for the challenge! (Remember, we start Monday, March 22nd!)

Image: Source

I’m an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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Twitter Hack: 5 Ways To Up Your Visible IQ

March 19th, 2010 | No Comments


Why should you care about appearing smart on Twitter? Because the people who hire, promote, fire, date, marry, and divorce you will all read your tweets (updates) at some point. It’s always a good idea to put your best foot forward. Why not do the same on Twitter? Why not make an effort to appear as smart as you can?

A “visible IQ” is a short way of describing the sum total of everything I can point to and say “see, this person [you] is really smart.” As a reader scans your latest tweets, they get an impression of you. You might seem smart, funny, thoughtful, or perhaps even boring, hateful, and sloppy. Twitter makes it easy to seem less intelligent than you truly are for 3 reasons:

  • No context – You don’t get to explain yourself.
  • Real-time pressure – Everybody is updating NOW!
  • Sloppy status quo – Nobody else cares. Why should you?

If you’d like to take some practical steps to make sure you’re doing everything you can to seem smart, try these tips to boost your visible IQ on Twitter:

1. Abandon Predictive Text (T9)

Don’t let your cellphone complete any texts being sent out as a tweet. It might seem like a good idea to let a bit of software choose how you complete your words. But only if you’re willing to be seen on Twitter as apathetic and sloppy. When you’ve only got 140 characters to make your point, every letter of every word needs to be in the right spot if you want your point to hit home.

2. Write Just For Twitter

Posting tweets from Facebook and myriad other social platforms initially looks like a good idea. It actually makes you look like you’re lazy and don’t care much for your audience. Instead of blurting blurbs to the nearest platform and letting RSS spread your thoughts, give Twitter some dedicated attention. After all, didn’t you want to add a few words of extra context to your Facebook status? Take advantage of that extra space! Take Twitter’s space restrictions as a challenge to write particularly brilliant 140-character pieces. Genius!

3. Sidestep Stoner Syndrome

Every complex thought reduced to 140 characters will end up sounding like it was pulled from a hookah. That brilliant thought you had earlier today about how the world could learn a lot just by watching ducks swim? You didn’t seem smarter when you tweeted it. You sounded like you were really, really high. All those inspirational quotes about failure being nothing more than success wrapped in bacon? They make you sound high. This isn’t your fault. Not at all! You can blame it on Twitter’s 140-character limits and our common human tendency to say as many profound things each day as possible. If you focus on sharing your perspective on simpler ideas, you’ll seem insightful and perhaps even witty.

4. Mark Quotes Clearly

If you must quote others, clearly mark the quotes as such. Otherwise, you’re in a prime spot to look like you’re trying pass off other’s words as your own. What’s worse, you might tweet an unmarked quote that seems funny or ironic to you at the time but it may come off as stupid or immature to readers. Look smarter by giving credit and using quotation marks “quote.” for tweets you didn’t come up with yourself. Hopefully others will do the same and you’ll get additional attention for the brilliant tweets you’ve been crafting!

5. Share Only The Best Content

You may have been told that you must share everything your friends are sharing if you want to be a good community member. The quantity of sharing is up to your personal beliefs. The quality of the things you share, however, isn’t up for discussion. If you share low-quality content, you look like an idiot. It doesn’t matter if your best friend published an article. If the article is terrible, you’ll not only damage your own reputation but that of your friend by sharing the article. If you want to be seen as an intelligent and savvy Twitter user, focus on sharing quality.

What tip would you add for Twitter users looking to look their very best for possible employers? (or life partners!) It’d be great to know what you think a smart tweet looks like. Link to your favorite in a comment!

You should follow Lifehack on Twitter here.

I’m an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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How to Do What You’ve Always Wanted

March 16th, 2010 | No Comments


I’m willing to bet that there’s something you’ve always wanted to do.

It could be that you’ve always wanted to write a novel.  Maybe you want to visit Africa or want to see the Northern Lights.  Perhaps you’d love to open a little coffee shop or brasserie in your neighbourhood or maybe you’ve had brainwave for a neat little product that just might change the world.

You’re not alone.  We all have things we dream about and things we’d love to do, and it’s rare that these things ever see the light of day.

Fear steps in – sometimes in the guise of practicality and sometimes wearing the hat of playing it safe – and provides all kinds of reasons why you can’t have what you want.

So you persuade yourself that it’s a pipe dream and that it could never actually happen because you wouldn’t know where to start, couldn’t afford it and it probably wouldn’t work anyway.  You lose faith in your ability to make your dream reality, and lose a little faith in yourself in the process.

The tragedy is that the more you apply a filter to what you wish for and train yourself to think small, the less confident you become in your ability to do anything that matters very much.  Worse than that, you set yourself tiny dreams that aren’t hard to reach, and you reach them.

But hang on a second. What if those big things were possible?  What if you really could make some or all of it happen?  What if it turned out that you did have what it takes to see something special come to life?  Wouldn’t that be something you’d leap at?

Here are my 3 steps to doing what you’ve always wanted to do.

1. Open it up

First of all you need to do some leg work.  Investigate what might be needed to get going, look for resources that can inform and help, seek out other people who might have done something similar and talk to those who’ve been there, done that.

There’s no risk here – it’s simply learning about what’s involved, picking up the key strategies that have been used successfully before and gathering together the ideas and resources that you believe will help you to get things moving.

Write down all the questions you have about what you want to do and then go answer them.  It’s possible that as you open things up you find that the reality isn’t what you expected and that it isn’t really your thing after all.  That’s fine – now you know.  But the opportunity to answer the questions you have and fill in those blanks is invaluable, and you might just find yourself getting pretty darn excited about what you’re discovering.

2. Make your choice

You’ve opened it up and answered a heap of questions you had – now you need to make your choice.  There are 2 ways to help with this decision making.

  1. Look at what really matters to you, not what doesn’t matter. If engaging with this project is something that really resonates with you then listen to that.  If you’ll grow and get enjoyment out of doing this, no matter how it turns out, then listen to that.  Don’t let any fears you have squash and stamp on what matters.
  2. Consider where your priorities are and what might need to change. You have other things going on (your family, finances, career, hobbies, relationship, etc) and you need to be clear about what’s at the top of your list.  You need to figure out what compromises you’re willing to make in terms of the time and energy you have available, and you need to figure out the boundaries and deal breakers of your priorities.  You might find that your priorities are such that now isn’t the right time to get going with this, but that doesn’t have to be the end of it.  Just figure out what criteria needs to be satisfied for you to start.

Once you’ve figured those 2 things out, make your choice and commit to it. That commitment is what will carry you through, and it’s an attitude and a way of behaving that shapes your experience and behaviour as you go forwards.

3. Do one thing

When you’ve made your choice to start, do one thing today.  Just one thing.  Then do one more thing tomorrow.

That’s all.

Do one thing, then another, then another (no matter how big or small) and you’ll make progress.  By doing just one thing a day you’ll be 365 steps forward a year from now.  Don’t get overwhelmed with the apparent size or complexity of what you’re tackling.  No task is bigger than your capability and you just need to chunk it down into bite-sized pieces and tackle each one in turn.

And if something doesn’t turn out the way you expected or hoped, don’t sweat it.  You have the next day to try things a different way or tackle things from another direction.  You’ll never be able to control how everything turns out so don’t beat yourself up – just keep checking where you are, making your choice and taking another step.

These 3 steps can be applied universally to do the things you’ve always wanted.  So tell me, what do you want?

Image: source

Steve Errey almost died at age 5 as he choked on a grape. Today, Steve is a leading confidence coach for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, with a reputation for talking sense and getting results. Read more at The Confidence Guy and follow him on Twitter. He still loves grapes, despite the risks.

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Kitchen Hack: One-Minute Bread

March 12th, 2010 | No Comments


Oven-fresh bread is one of life’s simple joys. Ciabatta, a crisp-crusted Italian bread with hints of sourdough and loads of crannies longing for butter, is one of the easiest breads to make at home.

Why are we talking about baking bread on Lifehack? Because kitchen hacks aren’t just impressive, they often have very tasty results! In this instance, I’m going to show you how to make ciabatta with less than one minute of prep time. How is that possible? Like many great hacks, this one uses simple ingredients and as few steps as possible to get the job done.

You may have heard of “no-knead” bread before. Mark Bittman and many others have promoted their versions of an artisan bread that doesn’t require any heavy labor. While those recipes also create delicious results, they involve too many steps to be considered a real hack.

I wanted something very, very simple that delivered great results in 60 seconds of prep time or less. It may take you a few tries to get below the one-minute mark, but I think you’ll enjoy the results every time!

For your ciabatta you’ll need:

  • 4 cups of all-purpose flour (do NOT pack the flour into the measuring cup)
  • 2 cups of warm water
  • 1 teaspoon of salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon of granulated yeast (or equivalent)

For the gorgeous readers needing metric equivalents of this recipe, Toon left a comment with the following conversion:

  • 500 grams of all-purpose flour
  • 4,7 deciliter of warm water
  • 4 grams of salt (= 1 teaspoon = 5 ml)
  • 1 gram of dry yeast (= 1/4 teaspoon = 1,25 ml)

You’ll also need a medium-size mixing bowl, a 10×15 cookie sheet or baking stone, a hand towel or plastic wrap, and whatever you’d like to keep your bread from sticking (if you’re using a pan, I use flour and corn meal).

Have everything handy? Good. Let’s do this!

1. Mix Water & Yeast

Pour the warm water into the medium-size mixing bowl and stir in the yeast with a spoon. No need to be particular, just dump and slosh.

2. Add Flour And Salt

Add flour and salt to your bowl of yeasty water. This, after measuring out the flour, presents another prime opportunity to get flour on your person. This will be regarded by many as a sign of your culinary determination. You’ll need such signs because anybody who actually watches you make the bread will think you’re one of the laziest bakers in existence.

3. Stir Into A Heavy Batter

Use a spoon. You could use your hands if you wanted but you probably didn’t wash your hands before starting this anyhow. Start with a quick run about around the perimeter of the bowl with your spoon. A few quick strokes through the middle and you should have a heavy batter. If it looks too thick to be pancake batter and not thick enough to be playdough, you’re right on target.

4. Set It And Nearly Forget It

Cover your project with a hand towel or plastic wrap and set in a safe place for a few hours. After the dough has rested for 8 to 12 hours, it will have nearly doubled in size. (If you add a bit of sugar at the start and you’re in a hurry, you can rush this process but I don’t recommend it for your first try.)

5. Preheat Oven & Prepare Your Pan

There’s a lot of room for variation at this stage. The goal is to place the dough onto a surface that will keep it from falling through the oven rack and not stick on. I use an old cookie sheet sprinkled with flour and corn meal. You can use a buttered pan, pizza stone, or baking paper. It’s up to you. The flour/cornmeal method takes only a few seconds.

Before you start prepping your pan/stone, set your oven to 400F. (For those of you using wood stoves, don’t stress the particulars. Pull a few cedar shingles off the back porch roof and get that fire burning hot!)

6. Pour Out The Batter

This is the fun part! Uncover the bowl of dough and slowly pour it out onto the pan you just prepared for it. You’ll want to use a spoon to guide the dough into place and get the last bits out of the bowl. The dough will be very wet and sticky. That’s okay! Get the dough out onto the pan and if you’re lucky, it’ll look something like this:

7. Add Spices (If Needed) & Place Bread Into 400F Oven

If you’re trying to stay within the one-minute prep, you probably won’t have time to sprinkle some of your favorite herbs onto your ciabatta before baking. If you’re not worried about time, some dried oregano, basil, and rosemary make a nice addition.

8. Remove Your Ciabatta From The Oven

Check on your ciabatta after about 25 minutes. Once it’s golden brown on top and looks good to eat, take it out of the oven and set it aside to cool for at least 10 minutes. You can cut into it immediately but if you do it’ll collapse and won’t look as pretty.

Wait! You really thought I wanted you to take a hot pan out of a 400F oven without some sort of protection? Craziness! If you don’t have an oven mitt handy, take off your shirt, fold it so there will be at least 6 layers of cloth protecting your hand, remove the pan from the oven and place in a safe spot to cool.

9. Slice & Enjoy

Move your ciabatta off the pan or baking stone and onto a proper cutting board for demolition and devouring. Ciabatta is famous as a sandwich bread but, like most breads, it’s absolutely delicious right out of the oven.

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Feedback Time!

  1. What do you think of this hack?
  2. Will you try it? (Let me know if you do. I’d love to see a photo of your results, too!)
  3. Would you like to see more articles like this on Lifehack? If so, is there something in particular you’d like us to cover?

Follow @lifehackorg on Twitter

I’m an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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Change Your Focus For Better Results

March 11th, 2010 | No Comments


In some of my workshops, I run a short activity which provides the audience members with an immediate and practical example of how and where we focus our attention and energy – and the potential consequences. It’s a pretty simple process used by plenty of facilitators.

How it works:

I ask my audience to spend sixty seconds looking around the room and to take note of everything that’s red. Any shade of red will do. Crimson. Fire-engine red. Burgundy. Maroon (are they the same?). If I’m feeling generous, I’ll even allow hot pink. I then tell them to commit as many red things to memory as possible. I tell them not to over-think the process, not to try to figure out the point of the exercise (and thereby miss out on the benefit), not to talk to anyone else, not to write anything down and to use whatever memory or recall method they feel will give them the best result. That is, optimal retention.

Turning Cogs

For sixty seconds there is total silence. An intense silence – if that’s possible. I can almost hear the cogs turning and the competitive juices flowing as each person scans the room frantically trying to absorb and remember as much (relevant) information as possible. Talk about focus – sometimes it’s as though they’re looking into the face of a loved one for the last time.

At the end of the allocated time I ask the group to keep their eyes closed. I then ask them a whole bunch of irrelevant and (seemingly) pointless questions for about two minutes. At this stage, the quantity and quality of their responses (to my questions) is pretty underwhelming as (1) their eyes are still closed and (2) they are desperately trying to retain the required information (the red stuff in the room) and to dispense with my stupid and annoying questions without being too distracted from their mental list.

But You Said….

Just when they’re about to storm the stage and punch me in the head, I ask them if they’re ready to share their memorised list with me. I place myself in front of a whiteboard with a marker in hand and say, “okay, keep your eyes closed and give me a list of everything in this room that’s… brown.”

At this point, I can literally sense the frustration in the room.

“But you said red?”
“I know, but now I want the brown list – keep your eyes closed.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life’s like that.”

Over the course of a few minutes, with all eyes still closed, the group begins to shift its focus and to review the room (in their mind’s eye) in a different way. Typically, most people will recall less than a quarter of the brown things in the room while being able to recall almost one hundred percent of the red.

“But you all studied the room before you closed your eyes”, I tell them.
“Yeah, but we were looking for red, not brown.”

A New Perspective

After a few frustrating minutes, I allow them to open their eyes and to instantly see what they hadn’t before: all things brown. It’s amazing what becomes apparent when we look at the same thing (room, relationship, career, business, opportunity, person, health) with a totally different focus. What was once invisible, becomes immediately apparent. Obvious even. When we shift our attention, we can find gold. We find ourselves with a different level of consciousness and a new appreciation for, and awareness of, what has always been there. In some ways, it’s like we’re opening our eyes for the first time.

This brief activity (looking for red) is a simple, yet effective, one – we find what we’re searching for. When we have a narrow focus (which we often do), we don’t see the entirety of what’s there. The potential. The gifts. The joy. The fun. The good. The opportunity. When we look for bad, we’ll find it. When we expect rejection, we’ll find that too. If we’re constantly searching for problems, we’ll never see the solutions.

Our focus becomes our reality and we wind up creating the very thing (situation, outcome) that we desperately want to avoid.

Sometimes we’re so obsessed with, and fearful of, the bad, we miss out on the considerable good in our world. Sometimes we’re so preoccupied with finding the red things in the room that we don’t notice (enjoy, celebrate, appreciate) any of the other amazing colours. Today I’m encouraging you to consciously take a look at your world through the eyes of optimism, gratitude and greater awareness.

Consciously find the good. It’s there.

So now it’s your turn to share a thought, idea, story or experience relating to this post… and yes, even you Newbies. Have you ever shifted your focus to shift your reality? Tell us about it.

Craig Harper (B.Ex.Sci.) is a qualified exercise scientist, author, columnist, radio presenter, television host, motivational speaker and university lecturer. For the past 25 years he has been a leading presenter, educator, motivator and commentator in the areas of personal and professional development. You can visit Craig’s blog at Motivational Speaker.FREE eBook – So… You’ve Decided to Get in Shape (Again) Craig’s FREE eBook takes 20 – 30 minutes to read, and addresses the REAL getting-in-shape issues based on his 25 years of experience. To get Craig’s FREE eBook click here, weight loss books.

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11 Simple Ways To Avoid Burnout

March 10th, 2010 | No Comments


Are you exhausted, annoyed, and ready to throw in the towel on something that once made you leap out of bed with joy every morning? I know that feeling well. It’s one I suffered from often in the past and still encounter occasionally. It typically signals an impending burnout.

Not the type of burnout you get from dropping your 93 Honda Civic into 3rd gear at 6,000 rpm’s. The type of burnout that makes you avoid work, question the value of your existence, and eat large quantities of Oreo cookies while watching bad television.

How can you avoid burnout and stay in a productive rhythm? Here are 11 ways you can start safeguarding your life against burnout:

1. Schedule regular social activities

Remember when you used to spend time with people you were neither working with nor sleeping with? You watched movies, ate meals, played games, and went on trips. You were active and you had fun!

You can regain some of that emotional fulfillment by contacting some of your old pals and scheduling regular activities. It doesn’t need to be anything crazy. Sure, rafting in Alaska would be fun but a monthly brunch with people you don’t see every day will do just fine. The point of this exercise is to expand your social horizon and crush the feeling that you’re stuck doing the same thing every day.

2. Follow a fitness plan

Why we give up exercise in order to sit in a chair and work for an extra hour at a lower level of intensity is beyond me. I used to do it myself. I dealt with stress by eating and worked instead of working out. The result? Not only did I burn out but I got really chubby, too!

If you want to avoid burnout, resurrect that New Year’s Resolution and figure out what it takes to get you exercising on a regular basis. Apart from all the physical benefits of exercise, you’ll enjoy the mental satisfaction of knowing that you’re taking good care of yourself again.

3. Pursue a hobby

Pick a hobby that has little or nothing to do with what you spend most of your week doing and pursue it with passion! A hobby that uses an entirely different skill set can provide your heart and mind with a satisfying break from the weekly grind and set you on a good path for increased productivity.

You probably won’t even need to worry about picking a new hobby out. The one you abandoned when you sold your soul to the work week is waiting for you to return. Shine up those golf clubs, get out the fishing gear, or buy a new pair of boxing gloves and get moving!

4. Volunteer

Nothing brightens the soul or warms the senses like giving to another for no reason other than to give. If you’re feeling run down by life, I implore you to seek out somebody less fortunate than yourself and work to help them.

Reach out to your local soup kitchen or professional organization and ask for referrals to local places that need your help. They’ll be glad to get you started and you’ll soon forget about badly you thought you had it!

5. Write a manifesto

Have you forgotten what you want out of life? It’s easy to lose track of time and even easier to forget about what makes us glad to be alive. What can you do to bring back that focus? Take a day or perhaps an entire weekend and write a manifesto, a declaration of purpose, for yourself.

The process will give you focus as you put your intentions into writing. You’ll also discover that stepping back and looking at your life as a whole has a way of putting the stresses of the moment into perspective.

6. Ask for help

This is a tough one, especially if you’re a resourceful I’ll-do-it-on-my-own type of person like me. But it’s worth the time it takes to ask for help making sense of something that’s been dragging you down. It’s worth the embarrassment of admitting that you can’t do something on your own to really get help.

Whether your struggle is with a particular part of a project or with something general, like time management, asking for help will get you to a solution faster than you could ever hope to alone. If you want to avoid burnout, you’ll need to swallow your pride on occasion and reach out for help.

7. Make others laugh

Humor keeps us sane even through the most stressful of circumstances. Laughter is fun and a great way to reduce stress. Even better, finding ways to make others laugh doesn’t just reduce stress for all involved. It allows you to begin viewing yourself as a source of fun and laughter in your social or work group.

You’ll find it hard to be glum and entertain unhappy thoughts when the people around you are excited and happy to be near you. There’s no need to be a genius comedian. Start out by learning a few good jokes and add as you go!

8. Make an escape list

An “escape list” is a list of everything you’d need to do in order to escape a situation that’s driving you nuts. In a work context, your escape list might include things like turning in a final presentation or asking for a raise. It might also include smaller things like submitting your resume to a new opportunity or drafting a letter of resignation!

You might never follow up on the items in your escape list but the process of writing one will help clarify in your mind that you are not truly stuck. You have options. Perhaps not the best or most fun options, but you are certainly not stuck.

9. Embrace a morning ritual

Are you starting your day on the wrong foot by waking up late, rushing about, and skipping out the door at the last minute? Try slowing down your morning instead. Set your alarm a few minutes earlier than usual and spend the “extra” time sitting in a sunny spot in your living room with a cup of coffee and a good book.

As you slowly add more to your morning, you’ll develop a fierce attachment to “your” time. Why? Because you’ve chosen to start your day with a focus on taking care of yourself instead of busting out of bed like a bomb squad.

10. Stop making excuses

Is everything that’s dragging you down right now because of something your boss, partner, friend, or client did? Getting caught up in how much everybody else is screwing up will put you on the fast track to gray hair and a stupendous burnout.

The fix? Accept responsibility for your part of the problems that plague you. Then start digging your way out. Once you’ve given up on blaming others you’ll start seeing more of the good in your life and the sordid claws of desperate solitary thought will no longer draw you down.

11. Be accountable

Accountability is something we’re all familiar with but rarely put into useful practice. You can use accountability to drive your personal development and avoid burnout. The trick is find somebody you can trust to give the down and dirty on what you’re trying to do and how you’re moving forward.

For best results, have your accountability partner NOT be a relative or somebody you’re dating. They typically won’t have the capacity for objective review of your progress. People who love you will often make excuses for you and you want to avoid excuses at all costs.

“Accountability breeds response-ability.” ~Stephen R Covey

Avoiding burnout is a matter of constant vigilance and regular maintenance. What are you doing to avoid burnout? Do you have any tips to add? I’m glad for your thoughts!

Seth Simonds is an editor here at Lifehack.org. Have a lifehacking tip and want to be featured in a future article? Follow @lifehackorg on Twitter, say hello, and we’ll go from there.

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I’m an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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9 Ways To Handle Interruptions Like A Pro

March 8th, 2010 | No Comments


9 Ways To Handle Interruptions Like A Pro

Are you easily distracted? I bet you are. If I told you this link led to a list of funny pics of deranged kittens, you’d likely click through and quickly forget our conversation.

That won’t happen this time!

Interruptions do the most damage when we allow their appearance to affect us long after we’ve returned to our initial task. This can happen for a few reasons:

  • We treat any break in our work flow like it’s a fracture in the final product.
  • We resent our seeming inability to avoid distractions and end up treating their appearance as a personal weakness.
  • We view distractions as a change in our journey instead of just another bend in the river.

What can you do about it?

1. Embrace Your Fear

You are not, contrary to what your mother may have told you, different from the rest of us. We all get distracted. We all get annoyed when a productive moment is interrupted. We all get fed up when scheduled events don’t go as planned. If you allow trepidation to sneak into your mind at the prospect of distractions, you’ll cripple your productive abilities.

Fearing distractions also fosters resentment against the ones doing the distracting. Recognize that you will be distracted sometimes and accept those distractions as opportunities to improve. You can’t stop distractions but you can keep them from taking over your day. This is your time!

2. Plan For Interruptions

Effective planning is a cornerstone of the productive lifestyle. Planning for interruptions might seem impossible. Does it to you? Here’s an easy visualization that will help you get started with your planning:

Start each work session by drawing a few squares on a small piece of scrap paper. These represent distractions that will almost certainly pop up. As you encounter and conquer distractions, put a check mark in the appropriate box. After awhile you’ll be able to do this in your head. Sounds easy, right? An expected distraction has no power over your day. You still have control.

3. Delegate And Postpone

Once you’ve identified an interruption as something that needs attention and not just a nascent longing to goof off, try to postpone your involvement. The brute way of doing this is to shout out, “I don’t have time right now. Don’t bother me!”

The classy option is a bit more involved. Take a moment to understand what the distraction involves. Is somebody dying? Is there a deadline you’ve forgotten? Is there a networking opportunity here? If it turns out that you’re not facing an emergency, postpone your involvement and delegate as much of the detail work to somebody with available resources.

4. Attack Procrastination

It’s safe to say that most of us welcome far more distractions than we should. Why? Because we’re chronic procrastinators and distractions offer us a way to slack off without being overtly lazy. The simplest way to attack procrastination is to synthesize urgency with truncated deadlines. If it normally takes you 3 hours to do something, hit the bathroom, grab a glass of water, set a timer for 90 minutes, and tear into your work! This won’t work for every project but it’s a lot of fun when it does!

5. Split Your Day Into Targets

Distractions are most dangerous to the person working without short-term goals. You can keep yourself out of the danger zone by setting targets throughout your day. You’ll probably only need to do this for tasks you really don’t want to complete. For example:

  1. Send uncomfortable email by 9am
  2. Complete meeting agenda by 12pm
  3. Say pleasant thing to annoying boss by 2pm

The power in this process is that you now have time-sensitive targets to steer toward once you’ve escaped distractions. That 8:45am phone conversation that might have gone on for an hour? Nixed by the email deadline. Crops dying on Farmville at 11am? Overruled by the meeting agenda!

6. Limit Inputs

The more you limit channels people can use to distract you, the less likely it is that you’ll be distracted. It takes strength of character to ignore social media and your ever-friendly smartphone. It takes trust in the people who work for you to step away from the rush of business and crunch numbers in the back room. It’s hard to disconnect because we often feel a tinge of irrelevance when we step out of the rush.

Do it. Your results will be proof that it was worth the effort.

7. Batch Outputs

Responding to emails in batches and scheduling a block of time to make phone calls can seem like a dreary way to do business but it’s a highly effective way to keep distractions at arms length. Batching is even more effective in minimizing the collateral damage caused by Twitter and other social networks if you jump in without a set time frame.

To get started, make a list of the things you must do every day to maintain good communication in your business and throughout your social networks. Give each tool or action it’s own time slot and allow a bit of margin at the end. You won’t get the momentary social high of constant real-time interactions but the long-term benefits will make up for your loss.

8. Communicate Your Schedule To Others

When it comes to managing people-based distractions, communication is key. Need to finish a project? Let the people in your work group know that you’ll be off-limits until a certain time. Trying to finish a freelance project in a houseful of kids? Let them know that unless somebody is dying or the house is burning down, you’ll murder a kitten if they interrupt you.

Obviously, if you haven’t taken the time to create a realistic schedule for yourself, sharing that schedule won’t help as much.

9. Begin With The Main Point

When you encounter a distraction, get to the heart of it immediately. Your “get to the point” style may go over badly with some people who prefer to give back story before sharing their main point. Apologize for any possible rudeness and ask for the main point anyway.

Once you know the main point you can ask for supporting information and make a smart decision about what to do before getting back to work.

Getting back to work is what you were about to do, wasn’t it?

If you’ve found a particular tip or trick helpful in your quest to beat distractions, I hope you’ll take a moment to share it!

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. ~Thomas Edison

Seth Simonds is an editor here at Lifehack.org. Get even more tips by following Lifehack on Twitter or subscribing via RSS.

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I’m an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

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February 18th, 2010 | No Comments


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Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He can be reached though his freelancing site at DustinWax.com</a., where his various projects can be viewed. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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Happy New Year!

January 1st, 2010 | No Comments

20100101-new-yearEveryone at Lifehack and its parent company Stepcase would like to wish you the best of years in 2010, filled with joy, companionship, and achievement. May this be the year your biggest wishes come true!

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He can be reached though his freelancing site at DustinWax.com</a., where his various projects can be viewed. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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Happy Christmas from Stepcase Lifehack

December 25th, 2009 | No Comments

Happy Christmas from Stepcase Lifehack

On behalf of the entire Lifehack crew and everyone at our parent company, Stepcase, I want to wish all our readers who celebrate Christmas a very merry one indeed. And to them and everyone else, here’s looking forward to a new year filled with peace, love, and joy around the world.

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He can be reached though his freelancing site at DustinWax.com</a., where his various projects can be viewed. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

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How to Develop a Lifehack

December 11th, 2009 | No Comments

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Image by Ennor

We benefit from the experiences of many on this site who have provided us with their hacks. It’s easy, fun, and makes my life a little better. Sometimes I get caught in a receiving mode, waiting for the next hack to come and enhance my life. I sit, waiting for an elegant solution.

Thinking about the word “lifehack” makes me think I shouldn’t be perpetually stuck in this receiving mode (which is why I’m excited about this opportunity to give back). A hack, by definition, is not an elegant solution that efficiently solves my problems. A hack is something quick and dirty to get the job done.

Excuses Not to Develop a Hack

Sometimes I get stuck waiting for an elegant solution before I try anything. The problem is that I don’t know the most efficient method until I actually try something. For example, some say the best way to sleep is for 20 minutes at a time spread throughout the day (polyphasic). Some say it’s best to sleep 8 hours. Some say drink a cup of coffee and take a nap (caffeine nap). With so many conflicting opinions, how do I tell which is best for me?

For all the research I can do, there is no way to tell the best way for me until I actually try something. I fear that if I try and fail, I will have wasted all that time for nothing. What if I gain weight, instead of lose weight? What if I have less energy than before? What if I hurt myself? There are a million excuses not to do something and many are perfectly reasonable, yet I am still stuck doing nothing.

Seeking efficiency and reliability is not the spirit of a hack. A hack is quick and dirty. A hack is a venture into the unknown. It’s learning to do something in a way unintended by the design. It’s far from ideal because it’s engaging reality. Developing a hack is not the most efficient way, but we may discover that it is a better way.

So how do we develop a hack?

Step 1: Be Filled with Wonder

Life is filled with routines that help us efficiently get through the day. We run our own personal programs on autopilot and often ignore everything else. It takes an intention to find something new to break free from our normal cycle.

If you ever watch people on hikes or even just walking by on the street, they are often so focused on their destination that they don’t notice their surroundings. Although, if you are along their path and stop to watch a bird or something interesting, they can break free to see what’s out there.

To develop a hack you must be on the look out for something beyond what you normally see. Question the design. Could it be made better? Can you make it better? Curiosity will naturally lead you down a journey as you seek the answer. It will require effort, but you will be willing to pay the price to see what happens.

Step 2: Be Adventurous

An adventure is about the experience. There is danger and you may fail. Although you may not end up without the desired outcome, you will always have new experiences. If you do not explore, you cannot find your own path. Do you really want to follow someone else’s rules, intentions, life?

Be challenged by the problem. The creation of the hack is just as much about pushing your own boundaries and abilities as it is about the creation for others to enjoy. If you don’t find yourself being engaged by the problem, then it probably isn’t worth your time. The reward of a hack is knowing that you have engaged the unknown and emerged triumphantly.

Explore. Discover your own paths. It may not be the most efficient path, but it will be yours. When you learn to develop your own hacks, you become the designer. You determine your own intentions, rather than following the intentions of others.

I experiment, explore, create, and just try to figure out new ways to enjoy my life. You can read about my thoughts and adventures on my blog: WhiteHatBlackBox

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How To Have A Chilled Out Holiday Season

December 8th, 2009 | No Comments

Feeling snowed under in the run up to the Christmas?As kids we look forward to this time of year. There’s the advent calendar, lights, tree, decorations, school vacations, stocking, a visit from Father Christmas and, of course, the long anticipated presents.But sadly, once you’ve grown up, with all the responsibilities and obligations being an adult entails, your Christmas spirit can get snuffed out. Even thinking about the planning, preparation and costs involved can fill you with dread.


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Great List Of Small Business Blogs For Entrepreneurs

December 3rd, 2009 | No Comments

Small Business Blogs For Entrepreneurs
The great thing about blogs and the “blogosphere” is that it’s a community of individuals and professionals who link together and learn from each other. But there are millions of blogs out there and it’s easy to feel lost at sea sometimes. Just trying to identify some good blogs to follow [...]

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Stepcase Lifehack on Twitter and Facebook

September 8th, 2009 | No Comments

Twitter, Facebook and social media in general have been talked about on the web for some time now and is a much talked about topic in the mainstream media recently. Although we have yet to add those wonderful icons that represent Facebook and Twitter on Stepcase Lifehack, we do have a presence in both Twitter and Facebook platforms and we want to let our readers know and invite you to join us on there.

Here’s quick run down of our channels:

@lifehackorg on Twitter
We are currently using the Stepcase Lifehack account on Twitter to notify our followers of new articles that are being published on Lifehack. If you haven’t yet subscribed to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter to get the latest lifehack articles. We hope to use this channel to converse with our readers as well.

@stepcase on Twitter
Stepcase account provides company blog updates, news, upcoming products and support for our current line of Stepcase Apps. So if you want to learn more about Stepcase, stop by for a visit to our Hong Kong office or want to offer us feedback, follow this account and converse with the team in Hong Kong.

Stepcase Facebook fan page
Much like our @lifehackorg Twitter account, the Facebook fan page is currently aggregating articles from both the Stepcase company blog and Stepcase Lifehack blog. We are looking for ways to improve this to benefit our readers. If you have any suggestions, join us on Facebook and share your ideas with us.

See you guys there!

Angus Lau is currently consulting at Stepcase. He is a
blogger and founded 852signal.com, a blog tracking startups and social media in Hong Kong. He is also a co-founding member of the Open Web Asia workgroup, a workgroup focused on Asia’s internet industry.

You can follow him on Twitter: @anguslau

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Review: Steelcase Leap Office Chair

August 5th, 2009 | No Comments

The office chair is one piece of furniture most of us spend most of our time in whether it’s at the office or even at home. Given the amount of time spent on one, it’s probably a good idea to find an office chair that’s both supportive and comfortable to get you through your day.

The Steelcase Leap is one of those ergonomic office chairs.  At first glance, it appears to be your typical office chair, nothing eye catching about it if you compare it to the similarly priced and popular Herman Miller Aeron chairs.  But when you plant yourself in the Leap, you discover how comfortable the chair really is and the many ergonomic features it offers.

Steelcase Leap features

The Leap test unit sent to us from Steelcase was in black leather with an aluminum base.  The chair has all the ergonomic features you can ask for in an office chair, from the comfy seat cushion all the way down to the smooth rolling casters.

Here are a few ergonomic features perfect for any office professionals:

Adjustable arms:
This is a pretty standard feature on all office chairs, but the Leap made it so the arms can telescope in and out, move forward and back, side to side, pivot at an angle and adjusts up and down.  You’ll be sure to find a comfortable position.

Upper back force:
You don’t get the springy, bouncy feeling of other office chairs when you recline.  There’s added pressure that makes for a smooth recline. The adjustments found in the Leap lets you customize the right amount of reclining support.

Natural Glide System:
What’s great with this feature is when you recline, the seat moves along forward, easy on your spine and your buttocks for the duration of your workday.

Adjustable seat depth:
Whatever your body size, you can adjust the seat to accommodate your body and still be comfortable.

Lower back firmness:
Any time you spend a good portion of your day at a chair, your lower back will tell you that it needs some support.  This feature allows you to adjust the firmness to keep your lower back feeling good by maintaining that natural curve.

Leap pictures

For the past couple months testing this chair, I’ve been literally glued to it because it’s that comfortable.  I actually found myself shifting less while testing the chair and my posture has improved ever so slightly.  While the chair offers a lot and I found all of their features useful, I didn’t like a couple minor things with the chair, all related to the lumbar support. I thought they could have extended the firmness range to allow for an even firmer support to the lower back. Another thing was the levers for the adjustable lumbar height, the sliding action was not as smooth as it can be and at times, I was able to set the lumbar support unevenly. Also, I thought the (build quality of) levers felt a bit out of place with the rest of the adjustment levers/handles.

For office professionals who are looking for a luxurious ergonomic office chair, this is one of them. All the features and benefits mentioned does not come without a price tag.  This particular chair we tested is priced at USD$1649 from Steelcase online store.  Steelcase does offer other models with different fabrics and finish that start at USD $849, also from their online store.

Prices aside for a moment and think about where you spend most of your day in the office, it’s safe to say that most would agree it’s at a desk, in a chair (bet you’re sitting on one right now, reading Lifehack).  If you are looking to make improvements at the office, you might want to consider adding a good ergonomic office chair.  It could be good for your body as well as the work you produce.

Steelcase also offers a good animation to help with illustrating how all these ergonomic features would function if you are unable to test it in person.

Angus Lau is currently consulting at Stepcase. He is a
blogger and founded 852signal.com, a blog tracking startups and social media in Hong Kong. He is also a co-founding member of the Open Web Asia workgroup, a workgroup focused on Asia’s internet industry.

You can follow him on Twitter: @anguslau

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