WE AT LIFE HACKS LABS HAVE dedicated our careers to understanding how geeks hack their own lives to become super-productive monsters of speed and acuity. This has, unfortunately, led many people to assume that we are in some way super-organized ourselves.

Oh, as if. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s sort of like confusing the territory with the map, or the glamorous fashion supermodel with the creepy guys hanging out at the stage door, taking notes on everything she does.

We are those creepy guys (metaphorically, at least). We’re trying to get our own lives sorted, and that’s why we spend all our time staring at and standing disturbingly close to the effective geeks. It’s hard work, and the longer you work at it, the harder it appears to be.

Take writing this article. Looks like a perfectly constrained job, doesn’t it? Write a few words, paste _{them into an email, and send it to whatever home-} “_{Some of us like solving} made, clanking machine made of string, cornstarch, _{and organic squid ink the MAKE staff uses to con-} puzzles a bit more than struct the magazine. It turns out, however, that the we like solved puzzles.” time and effort expended between writing that first word and just reaching this paragraph has, by our estimates, been almost infinite.

It has required, among other duties, a careful cost-benefit analysis of whether to write it using Microsoft Word or a text editor using DocBook Lite XML; the meticulous examination of four Wikipedia articles (including re-editing two of them); the compromise coding of a plaintext-to-RTF conversion utility; several great pizzas; and a two-hour Googling distraction into exactly how one might make machines out of string and cornstarch.

About the only thing we didn’t do was A) get the piece in on time, and B) shave a yak.

Well, that’s only partly true. Actually, all of this was yak shaving. Yak shaving is the technical term* for when you find yourself eight levels deep — and possibly in a recursive loop — in a stack of jobs.

You start out deciding to tidy your room, and you realize in order to do that you’ll need some more trash bags, so you need to go to the shops, which will involve you getting out the car, but the car needs gas, so you’ll need to go to the gas station first, which means that you should probably find your gas discount card, which involves finding your keys, which are in this room somewhere…

What can we do? Our anti-yak-shaving research is still ongoing (current estimates indicate between

five minutes and 50 years before we have it licked). But we’ve got some guesses as to why hackers hit the problem more than others.

The problem is problems. We like solving puzzles. And, if we were honest, we’d admit that some of us like solving puzzles a bit more than we like solved puzzles. And, thanks to our upbringing in the infinitely tinkerable world of computers, we subconsciously believe that any problem is a puzzle to be fixed. When you have a Swiss Army knife of a mind, everything looks like it should be dismantled.

Other people — you know, people who actually get things done — don’t have this problem. Much of the world, to them, is locked up, nailed to the floor, not something they can do much about. They navigate around mountains, rather than invent a new sort of crampon.

Super-efficient hackers, we think, do something slightly different. They learn when to say no to the temptation of endless fiddling.

We’re trying to get to that state ourselves. And, like anyone attempting to fix some busted code, the first step is sticking in a few breakpoints.

So, here’s the Life Hack we’re giving you: have a notepad (real or computer), and whenever you find yourself spawning a new sub-task, stop, record your task-switch, and note why you’re doing it. The act of writing itself may give you pause: is this problem-solving really necessary? If it really is an essential task, you’ll at least have a reminder of what you set out to achieve — and what that job was that you’re supposed to be returning to.

Solving the world’s problems is something good hackers achieve, often as a side effect. But you don’t have to spend all your time lost in your own life’s subroutines — even if that’s where the best fun is to be had.

*Don’t believe us? Check the Jargon File:

www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html

Learn how to shave your yak more efficiently at Danny O’Brien’s lifehacks.com and Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com.

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