Lifehacker 2.0
by Cal Newport

Scott Young began Wednesday, May 10th, 2006, like every other day: early. Most college students wring every possible minute of sleep from their mornings. Not Scott. He recently began a campaign to move his wake-up time earlier, a little bit each day. This strategy, he decided, would free more time to get things done.

As was his habit, Scott's first act after waking was to boot his computer. Three months earlier, Scott, then an 18-year-old college freshman, had launched a small blog from the office in his bedroom in his parents' house, where he lived while attending school. The blog was dedicated to life hacking — a broad term that covers, roughly, any practical advice for squeezing more productivity out of your day. The night before, Scott had posted the first entry in a new series titled "Habitual Mastery." The 1,600-word epic laid out an exhaustively detailed process for changing a habit. (It begins with the pathways of chemical impulses formed by neurons in the brain, and moves on from there.) He wanted to see if anyone had read it.

As his browser loaded his site's visitor statistics, Scott saw something new. To this point, his blog was receiving between 10-to-50 page views a day. An article that attracted a handful of comments was deemed a success. Not today.

"At first I didn't realize what I was looking at," says Scott. "The page view graph usually resembled a wobbly line. This morning, however, it was floored at the bottom of the screen."

Then he noticed that on the far right of the graph, at the entry for the current day, the line jumped up at nearly a right angle. Reading the scale on the graph's axis, it soon became clear that a profound traffic shift had occurred. Overnight, due, primarily, to links from a pair of popular blogs, his visits had jumped from 50 to over 10,000. "My first instinct was to rush down the hall and show my parents. They said, 'That's nice.' I don't think they really understood what was happening."

The visitors kept coming; 30,000 over the next few days. All of them were interested to learn Scott's thoughts on changing habits. After this initial traffic spike, his daily visitor count re-stabilized to 1,000. Then it began to climb. Now, a little over a year later, 50,000 visitors in a single day is not unusual. Over 300,000 unique visitors a month come seeking Scott's advice on being more productive. The site recently made a list of the top 50 personal productivity blogs, as compiled by Leo Babauta of the widely popular Zen Habits. Scott's traffic numbers probably rank near the middle of this group.

Though he has no hard statistics, informal surveys indicate that the majority of his audience is young, between the ages of 20 to 25, located around the world, from Boston to Johannesburg, and populated mainly by students and young professionals: all of them are eager to consume Scott's scrupulously logical dissections, with titles ranging from "Reclaim 75% of Wasted Net Time With a Daily Ritual" to "What is Happiness? The Emotional Quality Model." A recent post provided six steps for reading 70+ books a year. Step four, for example, notes that filling in all idle gaps in your day with quick bursts of reading can add an extra 30 minutes of read time without requiring changes to your schedule. Scott's story raises perplexing questions: Why are hundreds of thousands of young people so interested in what a teenager from Manitoba, Canada has to say about being productive? Since when did twentysomethings, the demographic that previously gave rise to the beatniks, hippies, punks, and slackers, care about something so prosaic, so establishment, as to-do lists and reclaiming wasted time?

To understand this phenomenon, we turn to some unlikely sources, including a small group of Silicon Valley geeks, and a young professor, who, during the early '90s, began to get strange results from a simple experiment.

TWO

Scott, now 19, is waiting for the start of his second year at the University of Manitoba, where he plans to study business. Slender, sandy-haired, and sporting a Chesire grin that dominates his youthful face, Scott speaks with the deliberate care of someone who recently discovered that his words carry authority.

His introduction to the world of productivity was accidental. Five years ago, a time when blogging was still in its infancy, Scott became a frequent visitor to the website of the independent game developer, Steve Pavlina. "I was 14, and I was interested in computer games and software and stuff," says Scott. "Steve was an expert."

Around this time, Pavlina launched a secondary blog dedicated to self-development. It contained an increasing amount of life hacker style advice for being more productive. (In the blog's first month, for example, Pavlina covered, among other advice, quarterly goal setting and "time-boxing," a fine-grained approach to time management.)

"Steve is a very logical writer," says Scott. "He would explain clearly that you should do this for this reason. Other self-help at the time would be like a story about a kid with cancer. This was supposed to fill you with emotion and get you all pumped up. Then an hour later you're like: 'Oh, I don't know what to do now.'" In a period of intense media saturation, many young people have developed advanced bullshit detectors. If you're fake, or selling something, you won't make it through the gate. Pavlina's stripped down logic made it past Scott's internal censor.

Over the next few years, Scott branched out from Steve to dip into the increasing number of online sources of practical productivity advice. In Feburary, 2006, during his senior year of high school, Scott launched his own web site. "Originally, I didn't plan to write much," says Scott. "My main goal was to write a piece of productivity software, and use the web site to drive traffic." Then he published his article on habitual mastery, and his outlook changed. "I realized that one article could have much more of an impact then a piece of software that took me six months to develop." His Bill Gates ambitions shelved, Scott turned his full attention to writing.

THREE

Scott's accidental introduction to the life hacker community is not unique. Of the over 50 young life hackers interviewed for this article, many recall similar stories of stumbling across a blog that snared their attention. Stevenson, a 24-year-old medical researcher from Boston, was searching for an online alarm clock when he happened across a post about using your time more efficiently. Jason, also 24, and a student at NC State, was initiated through an article titled "How a Moleskine Changed my Life" (Moleskine is a small notebook popular with life hackers for tracking to-dos). Marina, a 22-year-old consultant from Portland, Oregon, found Steve Pavlina through a lazy-afternoon Google session. "From there I just devoured information," says Marina. "I now have a blogroll of well over 100 personal productivity blogs."

Life hacking has become a major presence on the web, driven by a growing network of blogs, like Scott's, which labor over the smallest of details of extracting more productivity out of your day. LifeHacker.com is one of the top 10 blogs on the Internet, as measured by Technorati. Two other life hacker blogs, Lifehack.org and 43 Folders, rank solidly in the top 100. The only topics with a greater presence on this rarefied list are political commentary and technology. To put this ranking in perspective, a spot in the top 100 indicates monthly traffic numbers in the seven digit range. LifeHacker.com's traffic, for example, has grown to over 10 million visitors a month — ten times the number people who subscribe to The New Yorker.

The movement, however, has humble beginnings. The term "life hacker" was coined by journalist Danny O'Brien at the 2004 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. O'Brien gave a talk, titled "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks," about how the most productive programmers in Silicon Valley manage their information. He revealed that they deployed a library of simple computer scripts — "hacks," in technospeak — to help organize this data and replicate common tasks, like responding to e-mail or syncing files between multiple computers.

This was not Stephen Covey. These were Unix-geeks sharing tech tips with other Unix-geeks — but something about the topic connected with the audience. The online buzz grew as crude notes from the talk made the rounds through e-mail forwards. In September of the same year, a thirysomething web developer, Merlin Mann, started the blog 43 Folders. Mann helped accelerate the life hack meme further by divorcing it from its hardcore techie roots (in his first post, Mann admits "my PHP hacking skillz are middling at best.") He connected the tactics to the more mundane problems of the average knowledge worker. His early posts focused on Mac software shortcuts, and, the innovation he is now forever associated with, the Hipster PDA, a low-tech replacement for a Palm Pilot consisting of index cards, a binder clip, and, well, nothing else.

LifeHacker.com and LifeHack.org followed soon after. Around the same time, Steve Pavlina begin his shift from software to productivity. The topic turned out to be well-suited for blogging. It required no expertise or tireless research. Simply reporting on tweaks to your to-do list, or clever time-saving tips, was not only sufficient, but oddly addicting. A recent post on Effective Time Management, for example, lists three steps for processing your daily mail: either trash it, toss it on a well-defined "interesting" pile that you sort every weekend, or respond to it right away (e.g., if it's a bill, pay it). Predictably, thousands of small-time, non-commercial bloggers entered the scene after the first major players found early success. Technorati now lists over 1,700 blogs self-described with the tag "productivity." The full count is undoubtedly much higher.

Amid this explosive growth, it makes sense that young people, masters of the idle online walkabout, would start to encounter this information. It's less expected, however, that these same young people, famous for cynicism, and an Office Space-fueled distrust for all things related to cubicle culture, would become hooked. But they did. Student productivity blogs like Scott's boomed. Roughly 68 percent of the traffic to LifeHacker.com is now under the age of 34 — twice the number of young viewers who tuned into the most recent Real World premiere on MTV. A small post about this article asking for life hackers under 30 generated over 100 enthusiastic responses over the course of just a few days.

Why did this happen? To help answer this question, we turn to the academy.

FOUR

In 1992, Jeffrey Arnett, a new Associate Professor at the University of Missouri, began what should have been a simple experiment. Arnett asked young people of various ages if they considered themselves to be adults. At the time, human development orthodoxy maintained that the progression of life moved from adolescence to young adulthood with a only brief transition period in between. Arnett's experiment, therefore, should have identified a point where this crisp transition occurs. But it didn't. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 25 — a significant span by demographers' standards — had difficulty answering the question.

"They felt in-between," recalls Arnett. "They had reached adulthood in some ways, but not in others. This interested me. So I began to ask more questions, about love and work and family relationships."

As he probed deeper, Arnett began to develop a brazen addendum to the accepted theories of human development. The model of adolescence giving way to adulthood was broken. It was once true, during a time when people left school and entered directly into a marriage and kids and a stable job that would support them for their full working lives. But that was before globalization wiped out stable labor jobs and tightening markets forced companies to discard white collar workers at the first signs of distress. This was before the post-baby boom generation stopped trading their diploma for a marriage certificate without breaking stride; before the era of irony, grunge, and the creeping uncertainty of what to do with oneself; before the modern angst captured by the iconic characters of Douglas Coupland's Generation X.

Arnett described a new phase — Emerging Adulthood — that squeezed itself into the standard model between adolescence and full adulthood. It wasn't a transition, but a first class life stage, boasting unique characteristics and challenges. Arnett began to sketch out his argument in a series of small papers published throughout the '90s. As data accumulated, his confidence grew, culminating in his seminal work, Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties, published in the prestigious American Psychologist, in 2000, and the mass market book Emerging Adulthood: The winding road from late teens through the twenties, published by Oxford Press in 2004. His theory soon became accepted. By Google Scholar's count, the original American Psychologist paper has been cited over 450 times. There is now an annual conference dedicated to new research on the topic. It's widely attended.

"In my book, I call emerging adulthood a 'self-focused' age," says Arnett. "Not selfish, but self-focused. They now have the freedom to focus on their own development, more so than when they were younger, and had adults telling them what to do, or when they become older, and have a spouse, and kids, and long-term job to tend to."

Emerging adulthood, according to Arnett, provides young people the freedom to focus on the big questions: Who am I? What do I want to do? How am I going to do it? Personal productivity is a natural fit. If you're more productive you can do more. If you can do more, you can be more successful at reaching your goals. If you can be more successful, you can feel more secure about your uncertain place in the world.

FIVE

To understand the life hacker boom is to understand a sudden convergence; a perfect storm of factors that careened into each other over the past half-decade. The self-focused nature of emerging adulthood provided the interest in being productive and getting more out of life. The no-nonsense, intensely practical, technical tone utilized by the Silicon Valley geeks who ignited the original life hacker movement, wrapped this advice in a sheath of authenticity that can penetrate the demographic's well-honed bullshit detectors. Finally, the past two to three years witnessed the explosion of online personal publishing. Blogs, RSS, and social networks constructed a community of ideas where the right meme can effortlessly infect millions. In this environment, life hacker strategies, now freshly divorced from their techie roots by early promoters such as Merlin Mann, became widely accessible. Students and recent graduates began to stumble across this information. And it stuck.

It's possible that we're witnessing the birth of a major social movement. The young life hackers don't repudiate the history of former youth movements, from beatniks, to hippies, to slackers, but, instead, add a new chapter. Perhaps future generations will speak of the young people in the early 21st Century hacking their lives in the same way we talk about those of the '60s turning on and tuning out. On the other hand, the new life hacker movement may indeed just be another fad, catapulted into the prominence by the fluid communication of a modern connected age; destined to die when the next intriguing idea swats it aside. We will have to wait to see. In the meantime, however, a lot of young people, like Scott, are getting things done, and convincing their peers to do the same.

E-mail Cal Newport at calvin dot newport at gmail dot com.

— graphic by Benjamin Chandler (blchandler at sbcglobal dot net)