More insight into Life Hacks from Cory. His notes walk this clever balance
between making me regret that I couldn't be there myself and feeling as
though I still got much of the benefit anyway.
One note that I'm sure others will pick up on. Danny talks about
wanting to find a keyboard macro program for Windows. One excellent
answer of course is ActiveWords. I predict a phone call from Buzz to Danny in the near future.
Here are my notes from Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann's Life Hacks Live,
at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Danny's
been doing variations on his Life Hacks talk since the last Emerging
Tech conference — it's basically an effort to research the
productivity patterns of very prolific geeks and convert them to wisdom
that anyone can follow. Merlin has been adapting the fantastic
productivity cookbook Getting Things Done into a series of tools for geeks, on an equally fantastic blog called 43 Folders.
They're now working on a book version of their stuff for O'Reilly
called Life Hacks, and today's session was a preview of it — it was
uproariously funny and incredibly inspiring.
Here's a recap of last year, in bumper stickers:
HACKERS HEART PLAIN TEXT
Geeks store what they do in text and spurn big apps, using plain
text editors. Simplicity and speed, ease of search and extraction, cut
and paste. All you need in a filing system.MY OTHER APP IS IN ~/BIN
If it wasn't plaintext, there's one app that they loved, like
mail, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. The rest was little glue scripts in
~/bin, secret scripts they are embarrassed about and don't share with
others, though it turns out that they're all really similar.SUPER PROLIFIC GEEKS DO IT IN PUBLIC WITH COMPLETE STRANGERS AND LIKE IT. OH YES.
(don't put this on your car)
Geeks get their credibility and prolificness out of sharing
everything — put it in public and the public organizes it for you. Put
it on a Wiki and others will fix it.