Intro; Contents; Acknowledgments; 1 -- Introduction; Life Hacking Geeks and Gurus; Practical Philosophy, Self-Help, and Systems; Life Hacking's Shades of Gray; Nominal, Optimal, and Near Enemies; 2 -- The Life Hackers; Alpha Geeks and Authorpreneurs; 43 Folders and Getting Things Done; Lifehacker and the Rational Style; The 4-Hour Workweek and Lifestyle Design; Life Nomadic and Superhuman; 3 -- Hacking Time; Time Thrift; "Schedule Your Priorities"; Polyphasic Sleep; "Quadrupled My Productivity"; Privilege and Exploitation; Beggars in Spain; 4 -- Hacking Motivation; The Science of Motivation

Productivity PornThe Reproducibility Crisis; Odyssean Goal Tracking; The Rat Race; 5 -- Hacking Stuff; Gear Lists and the Whole Earth Catalog; The "Californian Ideology" and Cool Tools; "Masculine, Entrepreneurial, Well-Educated, and White"; From Much to Minimal; The Counting Nomad versus KonMari; The Dilemma of Stuff; Minimalism and Millionaires; 6 -- Hacking Health; Data's Meaning; The Transhuman Roots of Becoming Superhuman; "Butter Makes Me Smarter"; Experts, Experience, and Uncertainty; Supplements and Self-Help; It Works for Me; Soylent, Choice, and Control; Wanting to Believe

7 -- Hacking Relationships"Why I Will Never Have a Girlfriend"; The Origins of Pickup; Optimal: Two Bisexual HB10s; Nominal: The Challenge of Being Likable; Data and Dating; Yootling and Marriage; "You Are Doing It Wrong"; The Right Tools for the Job; 8 -- Hacking Meaning; The Ancient Stoics; Stoicism's Translators; The Stoic Life Hacker; Mindfulness and Its Translators; Apps, Gadgets, and Woo; Look Outside Yourself; Lost in Translation; 9 -- Blinkered; "I Choose Me"; Bending the Rules; The Blinkered Path; Notes; 1 -- Introduction; 2 -- The Life Hackers; 3 -- Hacking Time; 4 -- Hacking Motivation

5 -- Hacking Stuff6 -- Hacking Health; 7 -- Hacking Relationships; 8 -- Hacking Meaning; 9 -- Blinkered; Index

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Life hacking as self-help for the creative class in the digital age: using systems in pursuit of health, wealth, and productivity. Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces and load the dishwasher; they employ a tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a time-management tool.They see everything as a system composed of parts that can be decomposed and recomposed, with algorithmic rules that can be understood, optimized, and subverted. In Hacking Life , Joseph Reagle examines these attempts to systematize living and finds that they are the latest in a long series of self-improvement methods. Life hacking, he writes, is self-help for the digital age's creative class. Reagle chronicles the history of life hacking, from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack through Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek . He describes personal outsourcing, polyphasic sleep, the quantified self movement, and hacks for pickup artists. Life hacks can be useful, useless, and sometimes harmful (for example, if you treat others as cogs in your machine). Life hacks have strengths and weaknesses, which are sometimes like two sides of a coin: being efficient is not the same thing as being effective; being precious about minimalism does not mean you are living life unfettered; and compulsively checking your vital signs is its own sort of illness. With Hacking Life, Reagle sheds light on a question even non-hackers ponder: what does it mean to live a good life in the new millennium.

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