“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
Beverly Sills
There’s a “hack” for everything these days. Scrolling through your Facebook feed or Pinterest homepage, you are likely to find numerous ads and articles promising an easier and improved life with ten or twenty of the greatest life hacks. These articles and videos cover just about every genre and topic you could possibly imagine! There are hacks for home organization, hacks for saving money, for maximizing your wardrobe or beauty routine, for surviving parenthood and keeping your children happy, healthy, and ahead of the academic curve by the tender age of 5. There are also business hacks for growing engagement with your target audience, for increasing work productivity, and for repurposing office supplies to get the most utility out of a single paper clip. You name it, someone somewhere has come up with at least ten different ways to accomplish your goal, and they’ve probably made a Pinterest post or YouTube video about it.
Life hacks are essentially shortcuts, aimed at helping an individual to complete a task or accomplish a goal in less time and requiring less invested effort. Essentially, we want to accomplish a goal without putting the work in. Shortcuts are different than efficiencies. While hacks seek to eliminate work, efficiency is a tool that streamlines a process, but does not excuse us from the thought processes, work or effort. For example, voice dictation is an efficiency that allows us to respond to emails or text messages when using our hands is not an option (ex: while exercising, out walking or even cooking). This does not remove the work of responding to that text or email, but rather gives another, more efficient way to accomplish the same task.
We live in a fast-paced society that thrives on immediate results. We want the quickest, easiest path to accomplishing our goals. Achieving the same end with a fraction of the effort can seem like a wonderful idea! It can, in theory, give us even more time to invest in other projects or goals, thus increasing our overall productivity. So, what’s the problem?
Faster isn’t always better. In just about any endeavor, the process towards achieving our goals is just as important as the goal itself. It provides opportunities for personal growth on our path to refining and clarifying our mission. Although an alluring concept, there are several drawbacks to the life hacking phenomenon.
Lost Lessons
As previously mentioned, there is a lot to be learned in the process of working towards our goals. We can learn about ourselves, our strengths and our weaknesses, and how to maximize our strengths to increase achievement. We become more productive and well-rounded individuals through the process of trial and error, self-reflection and change.
Decreased Satisfaction
There is a lot of truth in the concept that things worked for are worth more. When you consider your life and your greatest accomplishments, I’m guessing the achievements you are most proud of are the ones that required the most effort and work. The more we implement shortcuts which remove the effort needed to accomplish a task, the less rewarding the accomplishment of that goal will be.
Burnout and Sickness
Although the idea behind life hacking is to provide us with more free time, rarely do we use this extra time for leisure and restoration. All too often, the time freed up by a hack is then filled with several additional tasks or projects. We can end up with too much on our plates and this increased busyness can leave us exhausted and feeling burned out on our work and our goals. When a “hack” does not translate into better use of the time, leaving exhaustion and busyness to persist, eventually our physical bodies will call a “time out” and we get sick.
Less Time
This may seem surprising. After all, aren’t hacks supposed to save you time? Although saving time may be the goal, many of us find ourselves spending so much time researching and crafting perfect systems to solve our problems, that we have actually lost time. Instead of dedicating concentrated time and effort to a task, we can spend twice as long looking for shortcuts to help us accomplish the same task. This is also known as task avoidance. Get honest about why you want the hack in the first place and you may realize there’s something else that needs your attention.
Next time you are feeling bogged down by the length of your to-do list, overwhelmed by the daunting nature of a particular task or project and are tempted to begin scrolling through Pinterest looking for hacks to reduce your workload, I urge you to pause and think about the value of the process. There is so much to be gained from taking your time and learning as you work. For solidarity and inspiration in the process towards achieving your goals, sign up HERE to be updated about future blog posts and podcast episodes.
Resources:
https://qz.com/942027/the-best-life-hack-in-the-world-might-be-just-living/
