The Beginner’s Guide To Life-Hacking
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, dreams Thursday Jun 5, 2008
While its great and all to read stuff about re-designing your life, taking mini-retirements, automating your income and sailing around the world with your kids in tow. A lot of us feel a million miles away from ever being able to effect such drastic lifehacks in our own lives. The good news is that to begin changing things doesn’t have to be so dramatic. There’s a ton of small, mini-lifehacks each of us can do that will start to mix things up for us right now!
By examining the small things we could change we learn a few things. We learn that we can change and that we are not destined to keep living out the same kind of days we have always done, we also learn what making a conscious change feels like (even if only on the small scale); what it feels like to do something different on purpose, rather than doing something because its a habit and we’ve always done it. The risk is of course, you might learn to like how that feels, and who knows where that might end up… 
The examples I’m about to give below might not seem extraordinary, but if you do make any of the changes highlighted below (or any of your own) then you have changed something that was ordinary (in the sense of usual, habitual) for yourself and therefore is, in a small way, extra-ordinary for you. Trust me, if you do make any small conscious change in your life, no matter how tiny, you will feel the fresh and bracing wind of change, even if just for a moment. And I guarantee that you will find someone to mention it to during the day - the surest sign you have just done something cool! None of the things below ask for any kind of sustained commitment - that’s not the point. The point is just to try a ‘one-off’; to enjoy the experience of trying something a little different from the norm. Here goes…
- Drink alcohol? Go out this weekend and just drink water instead - its just for one night; there’s no commitment to any longer period of abstinence, just see what it feels like this one time.
- Not much of a talker? Start a conversation with that beautiful stranger on the train - even if all you can muster is a ‘good morning’.
- Couch potato? Run, just once and for 10 minutes.
- Like your sleep? Get up once on a weekend at 4am for no reason except to see how it feels.
- Not a cook? Find a recipe and cook!
- TV addict? Go a day without it. Find something else to do instead, e.g. read a book.
- Always take the same kind of holiday? Do something really different. Perhaps a volunteer holiday giving help to a nature reserve or a devastated region.
- Drive in to work everyday? Just once, cycle in.
- Always in the office? Ask to work from home for one day.
- Fast for one day - its just one day.
- Give a random homeless person £10. See how that feels.
- Buy a loved one a gift for no reason at all.
- Make and take your own lunch to work for a week.
- Read a book in an area you have never considered before.
- Buy a completely different newspaper tomorrow morning.
- Put no sugar in your tea/coffee for a week.
- Dare yourself to take a cold shower tomorrow morning.
- Night owl? Go to bed at 9pm tonight.
- Drive to a beautiful spot on your own and sit and think about your life for an hour.
- Smoker? Stop, just for one day.
- Try not to complain about anything for a day.
- Meditate for 20 minutes.
- Re-arrange your living room.
You get the idea. They are all simple, totally temporary little changes - tiny experiments if you like. The point behind them isn’t to change any part of your behaviour, but to see what change feels like, and see if you feel even just a tiny bit liberated after doing one of them. So go on, try a mini-lifehack. I guarantee you will feel just a little bit awesome. You might even like the way it makes you feel so much you end up trying out some others. Keep on going like that and you might realise you’re capable of making much bigger changes. It may even be that one day you might end up sailing around the world on a mini-retirement!
One of the things that I find useful to “lifehack” is to sit down and make a plan of what I want to achieve this year, and in the long term. I then look at what I am doing at the moment and see whether if I continue along the same path I can achieve the goals I would like to. This can be a powerful technique for recognising the need for change, and knowing where you need to use a lifehack
@James I think that’s a good strategy. If you don’t have a plan how do you know how your doing? As they they if you don’t plan your life, someone else will.
Steve
I love trying new things just to find out how they feel. A lot of the most significant changes I’ve made have come from simple trials.
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