life-hacks
Introduction
Start Here
This is a fairly comprehensive snapshot of how I run my life and what I’m doing to improve it. (For everything else I work on, see Impact Projects.)
I’m a very different person than the Alex of ten years ago. I’m more organized, healthy, productive, and active than I’ve ever been. I continue to crank the wratchet of growth, though, of course, it has much further to turn.
There is a lot of compressed material here; I could write multiple blog posts on many of these topics.1 In the spirit of “perfection is the enemy of done”, I created this page.
I hope you find this page useful. I try to only include items that I’m regularly using. Though, the exact tools and systems I use at any given time are in a state of flux.
Last updated September 2017.
Some Important Heuristics
The following are general principles I use at all times, and heavily influence most of what’s on this page.
- Incremental progress – Focus on what you can do next to improve, not on how far you are from some ideal.
- Protect attention – Attention is a ridiculously valuable resource and should be treated as such. Reduce cognitive load, reduce distractions, reduce mental clutter, etc.
- Keep it simple – Directly related to attention, simplicity is extremely important.
- Use habits – Habits are “free” behavior. As in, a solid habit is executed effortlessly. People who have a deep exercise habit don’t need willpower to exercise, it just happens.
- Busyness is a lack of priorities – Busyness is a choice. Usually, busyness is completely unnecessary and is simply a failure to prioritize.