Part 1: LEARNING HACKS
1. Crowdsource improvements to ideas: when you come up with a new idea or are mulling over a complex idea and still find yourself uncertain or confused about it, post to Facebook explaining the idea, and explain that you’re curious to hear what other people think about it, or whether they agree or disagree and why, or what their own theories about it are. Crowdsourcing the perspectives of others can be a fantastic way to improve your own understanding and to get suggestions for how an idea can be improved. You may have noticed that I use this method all the time! It’s been very valuable to me.
2. Audiobooks when bored: listen to audiobooks when you’re doing things you don’t enjoy that require little focus (e.g., simple cleaning, laundry, riding the subway, or in the backseat of a car). Note that some public libraries offer ways to access numerous audiobooks for free (e.g., the N.Y. public library has the Libby app / OverDrive program).
3. Learn to listen faster: When listening to non-fiction audiobooks (that you are reading primarily for information rather than entertainment), start at a listening speed that feels comprehensible but slightly challenging (i.e., where you catch everything said but ONLY when you focus), such as 1.25x or 1.5x speed. Once that starts to become easy to listen to, increase the speed a bit more, incrementally working your way up. With some practice, you likely can get comfortable listening at higher speeds. For example, for most non-fiction books, I prefer 2.5x. But keep in mind you may lose some retention at higher speeds (especially when you’re not used to it – it takes practice), and you’ll need slower speeds for especially complex books and when you’re in environments that are noisy or where the focus is more difficult, so in each case think about what speed gives you the best trade-off between time used and retention of the content. I don’t recommend speeding up books that you read for pleasure unless speeding them up causes you to enjoy that kind of book significantly more. I also would really recommend speeding up online lectures and informational videos if you find that they are usually slower than would be ideal for you (I usually prefer 1.5x-2x speed for online videos – the sound recording quality is generally not as high as for audiobooks making very fast listening difficult). YouTube actually now has speed adjustment built-in (look in the settings under the video), but you can also get plugins for most browsers that will allow you to speed up other video content (e.g., the Video Speed Controller plugin for Chrome which works on all HTML 5 videos).
4. Record good ideas: whenever you encounter an idea or concept or fact or framework or process you’d like to remember, or think of any interesting idea of your own, add it to a notepad on your computer. Or better yet, use our new, free tool ThoughtSaver, which is specifically designed for this purpose: ThoughtSaver.com (note that this is very, very much a beta product and a very much improved version we’ve been working on will be coming out pretty soon). I’ve been using this technique for a long time and have my own personal database on ThoughtSaver of well over a thousand ideas, which I think serves as a quite interesting and potentially powerful resource! ThoughtSaver also provides a special bookmarklet for your web browser that you can add to your browser toolbar so that you can quickly add ideas or facts that you read online immediately upon reading them, and it will put things in your database automatically. Another related thing I’d recommend (that I’d like to improve at myself): as soon as you finish a new book (or lecture or blog post), get in the habit of quickly recording the most important ideas that you think you learned from it. If you don’t do that, you’ll very likely forget most of it, so jotting those ideas down may make your learning dramatically more efficient! Here’s an article I wrote years ago about the remarkable learning inefficiencies in the standard approaches we have to read: http://bit.ly/2A9uPwp
Part 2: HEALTH HACKS
5. Make a healthy eating routine: eat the same food five days a week for breakfast and lunch (but probably not dinner), and carefully optimize those preset meals for long term health and other things you care about, like cost.
6. Make workouts enjoyable: if you don’t enjoy working out (as many people don’t), one of the best things you can do for your health is to find a way to make workouts enjoyable. For instance, for some people, this means joining a team sport, or taking workout classes, or finding a workout partner, or setting weekly goals for yourself that are challenging but attainable, or hiring a coach or trainer, or listening to great music while working out, or picking a more intellectually stimulating form of working out (e.g., jiu-jitsu). Personally, the technique that I find works amazingly well for making working out enjoyable is to limit certain things I enjoy to be done only when I’m working out (e.g., watching my favorite T.V. shows). If you don’t enjoy working out, your chance of skipping workouts or quitting altogether will be much higher. Once you find a way to genuinely enjoy it, creating a routine that you stick to for the long term will be dramatically easier.
Part 3: LIVING HACKS
7. Use phone alarms: when you have a meeting or event coming up, free yourself from having to check the time over and over by simply setting a phone alarm to go off an appropriate number of minutes before you have to leave or log in for it. Set the alarm to vibrate only or make it a tasteful and quiet sound (e.g., I like quiet chimes) so that if you’re already in a meeting when it goes off, people won’t even really notice it. This technique is useful for both work and social settings. It frees you to focus on what’s happening around you (e.g., what your friend or colleague is saying) rather than thinking about whether it’s time for you to leave yet. I prefer alarms to go off 10 minutes before phone calls (to give me an advanced warning – plus the snooze feature on iPhones will cause it to go offer almost 10 minutes later, which works perfectly). For meetings that I have to travel to, I like to set the alarm to go off 10 minutes before I would have to depart for the meeting.
8. Turn off notifications: while some notifications may be necessary for your job, turning off all other notifications can make you substantially less distracted throughout the day; more productive. Every time a notification pops up, it takes you out of what you were just doing, potentially forcing you to recollect your thoughts to get back into that work. For certain types of work that require a lot of contexts (stored in working memory), this can be especially problematic.
9. Reduce device addiction: my favorite way to do this is to use various plugins, which can directly take much of the addictiveness out of various apps and services. For email on your phone, consider having it only update every 30 minutes rather than in real-time (which saves battery, too). The cost of device addictiveness is high: while we could be doing things that are more meaningful or important, we instead spend far too much time checking our phones over and over! This is not your fault (devices and apps are designed to be addictive) but there is something you can do about it. I also recommend setting a policy for yourself of uninstalling any app that you find you can’t control your usage of due to such a high level of addictiveness (e.g., certain games). It’s just not worth constantly tempting yourself by having them installed.
10. Be the one to reach out: when you meet someone in a work context with business cards involved, take the cards of people you want to be in touch with (rather than just giving them yours) so that you can make sure follow up actually happens (rather than leaving it for the other person to remember). More generally, when you meet someone that you actually want to talk to again, be sure to get their contact info rather than only giving yours; that way, you can be in control of a follow-up occurring. Then actually follow up! For instance, send yourself an email immediately after talking to them to remind yourself who they are and why you want to reach out to them (you can take a photo of their business card too and attach it to the email so that you don’t have to carry it around).
11. Use pros and cons: if you’re making a major life decision, don’t just wing it. Make a carefully composed list of pros and cons. Better yet, also score them with how important each one is. The purpose of this is to help make sure you’re not missing anything important and to make it easy to recognize which are the critical considerations that you should be taking into account (and which you can safely ignore). At the end of the day, this doesn’t mean you should trust the output of the pros and cons analysis, but going through the exercise is likely to improve your intuition on what to do because you’re seeding it with all the relevant considerations (and reducing the chance you miss something important).
Part 4: MONEY HACKS
12. Use quick math for tips: When tipping in the U.S. at a restaurant, move the decimal point on your bill over to the left one digit, then double the value, which gets you to a 20% tip, then round or adjust down (to give a somewhat lower tip if desired). For instance: $23.60 becomes $2.36 when you move the decimal point over to the right, doubling that makes it $4.72, which is a 20% tip. If you want to give less than 20%, you can then just round or nudge this number down (e.g., $4.00 is a 17% tip).
13. Automate savings: decide how much of your income you’d like to save (for long-term use/retirement) each month. If the company you work at or your bank offers it, set up your accounts so that the correct percent automatically ends up in your long-term savings account so that you don’t even need to think about it. Because if you have to remember to do it each month, the chances are that you won’t stick closely to your long-term plan. Now don’t touch that long-term account (other to adjust what long-term investments it’s allocated to). You should seriously consider putting away at least some % of your income each month for longer-term use/retirement / emergencies, even if you’re young.
14. Get a credit card that pays: with a little bit of research, you can find a credit card that will give you 2% cashback on every purchase. If you tend to spend in certain categories (e.g., travel), you can find even better deals than this! If your credit card does not give you this much back (as the vast majority of them don’t), it may be worth investing a few hours in finding a card that does.
15. Make long-term investments: if all of your money is sitting in cash or in a savings or checking account, strongly consider putting some of it into low fee long term investments (e.g., an ETF or low fee mutual fund that tracks the U.S. or world stock markets). Note that such investments can decline dramatically in value (e.g., see historical stock market crashes), so you should only put money in such investments that would not be devastating to lose and that you plan to invest for the long term (e.g., ideally, you want to have a 5-15 year investment horizon). Historically broad low fee stock market investments have been a great investment in the long term (e.g., in nearly every 15 year period since its invention, the U.S. stock market has outperformed nearly every other major asset class). For instance, it has crushed bonds and real estate and gold, and currencies. Broad stock market indices have the appeal properly of basically allowing you to invest in the returns of “businesses in general.” Of course, nobody knows the future or whether future stock market returns will be as good as those in the past 100 years, but we can at least say that your checking account earning you approximately nothing is a good long-term investment. (Of course, what I’m saying here is not to be construed as professional investment advice, invest at your own risk.) For more about the stock market vs. other asset classes and more investment hacks in general, see our clearerthinking.org article on the topic: http://bit.ly/2zIwt8K
Part 5: HOME HACKS
16. Hang stuff: you can dramatically increase your space for storage by hanging stuff, for instance, using a door or wall hanging shoe holder in your closet (e.g., see: http://amzn.to/2BslSvK), or by putting up extra shelves in your kitchen or racks around the top of your closets.
17. Photograph then discard: when you get a document that might be useful (but having the original copy of the document is unnecessary), just take a photo of it, email it to yourself with an easily searchable subject line, and recycle or throw away the document. This will reduce clutter. The Dropbox app even has a “document scanner” mode which turns photos of receipts and things into pretty nice-looking PDFs (many other apps for this purpose exist as well, but you may already have Dropbox installed, and it provides convenient cloud storage for these PDFs). You can even do this with objects/trinkets/mementos that have some nostalgia but which you don’t really want to clutter your house with (you can keep the photos of these in a special folder of “memories”). Here’s one of my articles with many more decluttering and organizing techniques: http://bit.ly/2BhHYAe
Part 6: TIME HACKS
18. Practice phone typing: people spend a lot of time typing on their phones, yet people’s phone typing speeds tend to be extremely low. So it may be worth intentionally practicing faster phone typing (while using good form, e.g., I prefer the phone in vertical mode with one thumb on each side, each thumb covering half of the keyboard). There are plenty of typing practice apps and games on the app stores to help you improve your accuracy and speed, and some are even slightly fun.
Typing on computers is really quite a different skill than phone typing, so it only partially carries over. It’s also useful to learn to rely heavily on your phone’s autocomplete feature (for instance, remembering that you don’t need to get every letter right and just continuing forward, knowing it will correct most of your mistakes automatically). Another speed trick on iPhone is to hit the space bar twice at the end of a sentence instead of hitting the period key. While you’re at it, if you’re not a fast typist on a computer, strongly consider getting some typing practice software and learning proper typing form. Better typing (on both computer and phone) has potential benefits beyond just speed: it may help prevent repetitive strain injury (RSI) in the long term (since good typing form helps minimize motion). For more about the highly prevalent danger of RSI, see my article on dangers we should probably be more worried about http://bit.ly/2AaFTsG
19. Cleaning help: if you can afford to have your cleaning and laundry done by someone else (e.g., $15-$35 per hour in the U.S. depending who you hire or whether you use a cleaning company), and you don’t enjoy those activities, and the idea of it doesn’t weird you out, you should strongly consider hiring someone to do them for you on a repeating schedule (e.g., once every 1-3 weeks). Obviously, if you can’t afford this, then don’t do it, but if you do have the money, then I think this is some of the lowest hanging fruit in terms of freeing up time for doing things that are more important to you. You can use our clearerthinking.org “value of your time” calculator to figure out the dollar value that saving an hour of your time is worth to you, and hence at what price getting cleaning help might be worth it: http://bit.ly/2smheJX
20. Write any time: if you enjoy writing (e.g., blog posts, essays, or stories) but don’t seem to find enough time to do it, keep a note file on your phone with an ongoing draft, and whenever you’re waiting for something (e.g., the train, a late friend) pop it open and continue whatever writing you’re working on. For iPhone, I highly recommend the built-in Notes app for this since it will sync with your computer too automatically (just create a new category under iCloud in Notes for all your in-progress writing – I have more than 20 pieces of writing in progress at the moment on Notes, which is way, way too many). For long pieces of writing, keep each section or chapter in a separate note to make it easier to edit just the part you were working on. I’ve come to find writing more meaningful than reading even, so I’ve increasingly been converting reading time into writing time. Keeping all my in-progress writing on my phone in Notes has made this a lot easier.
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