The term life hack refers to productivity tricks that computer programmers devise and employ to cut through information overload and organize their data. In more recent times, the same phrase has expanded to any sort of trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method to increase productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life; in other words, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.[1]
The original definition of the term hack is an inelegant but effective solution to a specific computing problem. The term was later extended to life hack that referred to a more general solution related computer problems that occur in a programmer's everyday life. These included quick-and-dirty shell scripts and other command line utilities that filtered, munged and processed data streams like e-mail and RSS feeds.[2][3] Examples of these types of life hacks might include utilities to synchronize files, track tasks, remind yourself of events or filter e-mail.
The term became popularized in the blogosphere and is 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.
"Life" refers to an individual's productivity, personal organization, work processes or any area the hacker ethic can be applied to solve a problem. The terms hack, hacking, and hacker have a long history of ambiguity in the computing and geek communities, particularly within the free and open source software crowds.
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British technology journalist Danny O'Brien coined the term life hack after polling a group of productive geeks on the details of their work processes.[4] O'Brien discovered a pattern among these super-productive programmers: that they devised and used "embarrassing" scripts and shortcuts to get their work done.[2]
O'Brien summarized his research in a presentation called Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California in February 2004.[5] After his presentation, use of the term life hack spread in the tech and blogging community.
For a brief period of time after the conference, O'Brien worked on developing a web site devoted to life hacks which never launched, called lifehacks.com.[2][6] In September 2004, Merlin Mann launched 43folders.com, a topical blog dedicated to productivity tricks and life hacks, on which Mann invented the Hipster PDA.
Blog network Gawker Media launched a blog dedicated to life hacks, Lifehacker.com, in January 2005. Independent blogger Leon Ho launched Lifehack.org in May 2005.[7] Eventually O'Brien redirected lifehacks.com to 43folders.com. O'Brien and Mann co-write a column entitled "Life Hacks" for O'Reilly's Make magazine which debuted in February 2005. O'Brien and Mann also co-presented a session called "Life Hacks Live" at the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference.[8] In 2006, Kelly Sutton and Rosario Doriott founded the website HackCollege, a lifehacking site for four-year university students.[9]
In recent years the term lifehacking has also been associated as an answer to information overload. Authors like Gina Trapani and Jim Stolze have been describing tips on how you can prevent your inbox from overflowing. Also Merlin Mann introduced the "inbox-zero method."[10]
The American Dialect Society voted lifehack (one word) as the runner-up for "most useful word of 2005" behind podcast.[11] The word was also added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online in June 2011.[12]