SansPoint

For the past two weeks, I’ve had a small, but nagging problem: one of the various things on my walls, the cut out center of Herb Albert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”.^[1] I had stuck it on the wall with two dime-size hunks of Tack-N-Stick, a gray, sticky substance with a consistency like Play-Doh. While the goo had been enough to hold the thing to the wall for a while, heat and humidity reduced it’s ability to stick, and it fell down repeatedly. Stupidly, thinking that the small amount had been enough before, I just tried sticking it back up for it to fall again.

This seems like an odd example, and it is, but there is a lesson here. Needs change, and systems have to change to adapt. Increasing the amount of Tack-N-Stick was enough to get the LP center to stay, even with the heat. Likewise, I’m realizing that other systems that provide support have to adapt to changing needs. This sort of heuristic development is the center of all lifehacking. We change the system we use to adapt to our changing needs. Copying someone else’s lifehack whole sale tends to fail. You need something that’s going to work for you, with you, and support you where you need help. Merlin Mann may be a whiz at emptying his inbox every day, but it took a new heuristic for him to clean out his junk.

When I griped about needing a goal tracker widget, I was seeking a new heuristic to compensate for a failure of my support structure to accomplish daily goals. Requiring me to deliberately bring up the Joe’s Goals site to gauge what I’ve done each day was more effort than I tended to exert. Having the site as my browser’s home page is enough, at least for now, to force my mind to think about my daily goals.^[2]

Being a college student on summer vacation, the typical constructs that form a support system for my daily activities have fallen aside. My main requirement each day is to be at work by six PM. History has shown that the natural action for me, then, is to sleep in until 4 PM, eat some fast food before I go in, and stay up all night. Instead, I’ve set up a system where I force myself up at the time I’m going to need to get up when classes resume. This gives me the day to accomplish tasks, as opposed to the night which I would most likely waste goofing around online.^[3]

Even a small, simple change can do wonders. Systems like this are best implemented in small steps, bits and pieces working towards a larger goal. Forcing oneself into a massive, overnight life-change is a recipe for disillusion and failure. Examine your situation, and see if a little change to your heuristic for dealing with life can’t improve things. Evaluate the reasons for your actions, the advantages of changes, and implement something. You can always switch back if it doesn’t work. What do you have to lose, except perhaps a bad habit?

1. I know most people want this record for the album art, but if you like stupid 50s lounge music as much as I do, it’s essential. ↩
2. Of course, if I can’t be bothered to click a bookmark, what makes me think I’d bring up Dashboard? I find that I bring up Dashboard on a regular basis to check on my website stats, see my exercise routine, or just to use the calculator. Having my daily goals visible and trackable there is a logical extension of the idea. ↩
3. This isn’t to say I don’t goof around online during the day, but I do other things as well. Productive things. ↩