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Life hack

Trick to make life easier

Life hack

Trick to make life easier

Note

the concept

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A life hack (or life hacking) is any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency in all walks of life. The term was primarily used by computer experts who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow in ways other than programming.

Overview

The term life hack was coined in 2004 during the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California by technology journalist Danny O'Brien to describe the "embarrassing" scripts and shortcuts productive IT professionals use to get their work done. It is used to describe an inelegant but effective solution to a specific computing problem, such as quick-and-dirty shell scripts and other command line utilities that filtered, munged and processed data streams like e-mail and RSS feeds. O'Brien stated "Hacks are often a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix. And for most people, geeks or not, modern life is just this incredibly complex problem amenable to no good obvious solution. But we can peck around the edges of it; we can make little shortcuts.

O'Brien and blogger Merlin Mann later co-presented a session called "Life Hacks Live" at the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. The two also co-authored a column entitled "Life Hacks" for O'Reilly's Make magazine which debuted in February 2005.

The American Dialect Society voted lifehack (one word) as the runner-up for "most useful word of 2005" behind podcast. The word was also added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online in June 2011.

References

References

  1. (2005-03-17). "Interview: father of "life hacks" Danny O'Brien". Lifehacker.com.
  2. "Cory Doctorow's notes from Danny O'Brien's first Life Hacks presentation".
  3. (1999-02-22). "O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2004". Conferences.oreillynet.com.
  4. (1999-02-22). "O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005". Conferences.oreillynet.com.
  5. "Life hacks". Makezine.com.
  6. "Words of the Year 2005.pdf".
  7. (3 June 2011). "'NSFW,' 'ZOMG,' and 'Twittersphere' added to dictionary". today.com.
  8. (2007-05-18). "Working". washingtonpost.com.
  9. Reimold, Dan. (2010-09-08). "How College Students Became Mini-Media Moguls in School". PBS Media Shift.
  10. (27 May 2014). "Unethical Life Hacks can make you a better bad person".
Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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