Tips for hacking your digital life

Once in awhile it's a good idea to spend half an hour poking around for better ways to do things you already do. When you think about it, we often look around "how tos" when we need to do something new, but the things we really need to get better at are things we do most often. Sure there are diminishing returns, but if you do a routine task 18 times a day and you learn a shortcut the drops 10 seconds from that task you've given yourself a 3 minute gift of time. (Tim Ferris of the fourhourblog.com would point out that time is not money, you can get money back, time is much more valuable.) So if you invest 30 minutes a week in tweaking how you do what you most often do, you'll be surprised how quickly these hacks can add up to increase your yield and reduce what's cluttering up your focus. Here's a couple of approaches: 1. hit a site that specializes in these sorts of tips, like lifehacker.com, or 40tech.com this is a cool way to stumble into things you wouldn't have thought to look for, but can easily become a time waster if you don't set a time limit. 2. Search for targeted advice on a topic. There are tons of video tutorials on youtube, and I've found a new little gem in about 50% of the ones I check out. My first secret to searching for hacks is to use google to search for a topic even if I think I know what database I'm going to look at. This is especially true of youtube and biblegateway.com search for what you want and then scroll down to the result you're looking for. If you go to the database and then search you'll get less accurate results. Here's a video I happened upon while looking for a way to turn tasks back on in google calendar. http://youtu.be/MVM5deFMJD8