Life Hacking - Page 3

A collection of posts on Life Hacking

Life HackingJan 1, 2013
The Science of New Year’s Resolutions: Why 88% Fail and How to Make Them Work

Wanting to change yourself and better yourself is a beautiful and inspiring thing, I believe. And it turns out that’s also how most other people think: 50% of all Americans for example set themselves a New Year’s resolution. That’s pretty amazing! What’s not so great is that according to the researcher Richard Wiseman, 88% of all those set resolutions from half of America and probably lots of other people in the world fail. That’s 156 million failed resolutions and disappointed minds each and

Life HackingNov 15, 2012
What the Research on Habit Formation Reveals About our Willpower and Overall Well-Being

This is guestpost by Jason Shen, an entrepreneur, blogger, and athlete, more about Jason at the end of the post. In the past decade, there has been a lot of fascinating academic research conducted around habit formation and willpower. By examining things like how smokers quit and why student perform well, researchers are starting to piece together the answers to how we can build lasting habits and improve our ability to resist temptation. One surprising result is this: to improve your overall

Life HackingOct 23, 2012
Why We Buy Into Ideas: How to Convince Others of Our Thoughts

This is a guestpost by Iris Shoor , co-founder and VP Product and marketing at Takipi , more about Iris at the bottom of the post. If you think about it, each one of us has different natural and acquired capabilities. Some of us learn new languages quickly, some are more social than others while some remember the face of each person they’ve come across. These strengths determine how we think and make decisions. Yes, this is probably obvious – d

Life HackingOct 17, 2012
How Your Productivity Is Determined by What You Eat

Every 7 years our body will change completely. This means that each and everyone of your cells will have been renewed and exchanged for another one that your body has produced. I was always amazed by this. And science suggests that this gives us a unique chance to change and erase any mistakes we’ve made in the past. How? Through a focus on the food we eat. Fortunately we don’t have to wait 7 years. Day-to-day changes to our diet can have a massive impact on our productivity. Something like thi

Life HackingSep 20, 2012
The Science Behind What Motivates Us to Get Up for Work Every Day

The following post is a guestpost by Walter Chen, founder of a unique new project management tool IDoneThis. More about Walter at the bottom of the post. So, here is the thing right at the start: I’ve always been uncomfortable with the traditional ideal of the professional — cool, collected, and capable, checking off tasks left and right, all numbers and results and making it happen, please, with not a hair out of place. An effective employee, no fuss, no muss, a manager’s dream. You might as w

Life HackingSep 11, 2012
5 Default Reactions That Prevent You From Making Good Decisions

Most of us like to think that we are in-control of our actions. Turns out, your brain can be a big jerk, and you are susceptible to a large list of cognitive biases and natural reactions that tend to hold you back from acting objectively. Luckily, some good social psychology books (spurred on by well-research papers & experiments!) have revealed a large amount of these biases to the common reader. Today, we’re going to take a look at 5 notorious social biases and discuss ways that you can reco

Life HackingAug 23, 2012
What Happens to Our Brains When We Exercise and How It Makes Us Happier

Exercise has been touted to be a cure for nearly everything in life , from depression , to memory loss , Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and more. At the same time, similar to the topic of sleep [https://buffer.com/resources/how-much-sleep

Life HackingAug 8, 2012
How Much Sleep Do We Really Need to Work Productively?

Every one of us, on average, will be sleeping 24 years in our lifetime. That’s a pretty long time if you ask me and makes it even more important to know exactly how the phenomenon of sleep impacts us. And still, there are so many unanswered questions evolving around sleep and how much we need of it. In fact, Most of what we know about sleep we’ve learned in the past 25 years. One of the biggest problems I’ve discovered is that sleep is such an over talked topic. We get the general idea that we

Life HackingJul 24, 2012
The big list of 100 tools, tips and tricks to work more efficiently online

What does it take to be productive? It’s a question I often ask myself and to be honest I don’t have a great answer for it yet. One key discovery I’ve made over the past year or so is that I need to have great habits in place. That’s why I’m working on a solid running routine and on a set wake-up time and sleep time. These things have been incredibly helpful for me and I know both Joel and Leo have discovered the same. One other realization I had is that, as I now spend so much of my day worki

Life HackingJul 17, 2012
A grand experiment: What one thing would you tell your younger self?

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” – Jean-Paul Sartre In the few years I’ve lived, there were countless mistakes I’ve made. Now, I’m not at all a person of regret. I stand up, fall down, get up and fall down again. I’m sure you are the same, that’s what has got you this far in life. And yet, every so often I get this urge of thinking “if I only knew this a few years ago”.  That one bit of advice to face that challenge, finish that exam, get that job or start that business

Life HackingJul 11, 2012
How Our Brains Stop Us Achieving Our Goals and How to Fight Back

As admittedly wonderful and fascinating as the human brain is, it definitely can feel like our brain is out to get us sometimes. Summed up perfectly in the many observations of the “Scumbag Brain ” meme, our brain does seem to engage in “sabotage” in terms of how it naturally reacts to situations. The scary thing is that in some circumstances, these feelings are backed up by actual research! We’ve already discussed how poorly our brain operates while

Life HackingJun 26, 2012
What Multitasking Does to Our Brains

We all know this and have heard it hundreds of times. To work efficiently we have to single task. No multitasking. And yet, we let it slip. We end up eating lunch in front of the TV with our laptop open. We browse Twitter and Facebook while sending emails and chatting in multiple Gchat windows. We know we really should be focusing on just that one assignment, blog post, proposal or piece of code but we just can’t. For the vast majority of us, multitasking by working on different things at the

Life HackingApr 17, 2012
10 free tools to help you organize the internet

The internet is a big place. For a long time, I found the task of organizing and remembering all the articles, images, videos, posts, tweets, and sites to be formidable. The mass of information only continues to grow, but I have latched on to 10 free tools that help me organize my online journey. 5 are common, and 5 are just getting big on the scene. I hope you can find some that help you as well. 1.) Evernote I have been using Evernote [https://buffer.com/resources/how-to-us

Life HackingMay 2, 2011
6 steps to complete distraction on my way to productivity

Organised chaos or easily distracted?Today I wanted to Buffer a few tweets from my Twitter stream. Yet this is not quite how my venture turned out. Here is what happened instead: 1.) Should I Buffer Tweets? I wanted to Buffer a few tweets from twitter.com, and found one interesting user with a blog about Social Media and Web development. So I thought about getting in touch and dropping him an email if he was interested in a guestpost. 2.) Or write an Email? Whilst writing the email, I reali

Life HackingApr 29, 2011
10 New Inspirational Quotes For A Great Friday

Here are 10 new quotes by our amazing users and friends. They will all be officially added to Buffer Tweet Suggestions . I hope they give you a boost for your day and set you off to a great weekend: “It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind that determines which way we will go.” – Jim Rohn Via @DanielSharkov “As you walk down the fairway of life you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one

Life HackingApr 22, 2011
10 Motivational Quotes to round up your Friday

Today is the kick off of our post series on new quotes. They are now officially added to Buffer Tweet Suggestions . Take a look below, I hope they inspire you and make you laugh in the same way they did for me. Your life is an occasion. Rise to it. – Suzanne Weyn ~ Via @BeingSridhar Great twitterer show their greatness by the way they treat new twitterers ~ @RuhaniRabin Via @AnnTran_ [http://ann-tran.com/2011/03/top-1