This is a guest post by Adrian Koh of Whakate.
The tussle between lifehacking and living the perfect life is as old as personal development itself. “Lifehacking” — a recently-coined word to refer to tips and tricks that lead to productivity boosts — focuses on a bottom-up approach of managing the input of work rather than goals and priorities.
To be clear, this tussle between hacking and living is not one of importance – when it comes to success, we would all agree that making sense of our priorities is far more important than being able to type 200 words a minute.
The real decision people face is which one should come first: lifestyle design or lifehacks? After all, lifehacks can help you gain control of work so that you can start making sense of higher priorities. But have lifehackers got it all backwards?
The Thing About Lifehacks (The Bottom-Up Perspective)
I have been a serial lifehacker for years. I must admit to having had tons of fun fiddling with gadgets to enhance my productivity. All those years of tweaking my system have not been frivolous, though. I’m proud to say that I’ve mastered the art of email management, task list management and how to get my head “clear” to focus on the issue at hand. Skills like these are terribly useful and have served me well at life and work.
Lifehacks made work a little more fun for me – and still do, to this day. I don’t think I would have been able to handle a promotion and a new family as well as I did with a good hack or two. However, once the excitement of increased efficiency wore off, there was a nagging suspicion that I didn’t really save the world with the hacks I had used. In fact, being at my productive best might have been a distraction from the more important issues in my life.
That’s when life design caught my attention.
The Thing About Lifestyle Design (The Top-down, All-round Perspective)
Whether you call it lifestyle design, life design, work-life balance, or enlightened self-management, the central idea is this: life should be lived consciously and deliberately, and not left to chance.
I first heard about the concept of designing your life in its entirety when speaking to the editors at Whakate. The essence of it struck me as a holistic approach to balancing your life. Starting with an understanding of my personality, responsibilities, roles and tasks, it set me on a discovery of “who” I was and “why” I did what I did.
The intention, of course, was to help me chart out a life designed with meaning defined by me – this is the “what” and “how” of life – and to get me to balance all my goals with the finite time that I had.
If that struck a chord with you, I’d like to show you how you could get started on life design too:
- Know who you are. Get an objective perspective of your personality with tests like MBTI. There are free versions available (here’s an example) and there’s significant research backing them. It’s unlikely you’ll get many surprises from the tests, but it’s always eye-opening to see how people with similar traits succeed in fields that you have always been interested in.
- Make use of your time. Monitor yourself and how you spend your time, identify and eliminate your time wasters, and start zeroing in on the things that you choose to be done. I can guarantee serious revelations into how you organize your day if you’ve never done this before.
- Get organised. At this point, tweak, hack or get a bottom-up perspective if you must, but the focus of life design is to get moving. In truth, the only time management or productivity system that works is the one that actually makes sense to you and gets you to move forward. The difference is that now you’re armed with knowledge of your personality and your priorities (the top-down perspective) giving you a good platform to do what matters most.
- Embrace your roles. Knowing what your roles are – whether in your career, family, or social circle – gives you a basis to set goals and develop the values you need to make your life work. Don’t worry if you don’t feel like you’re getting it right the first time around. Our lives are a constant work in progress, with shifting goals and values as we go through life. The idea is to have an intimate knowledge of everything present in our life, and then start designing it for the desired outcome.
Closing Thoughts
While there’s a logical flow to how life design should be approached, there’s no one formula or set of values that will make life successful. The emphasis of life design is to create a life that you consciously construct for yourself. This makes your achievements and outcomes unique and personally satisfying.
The question to ask, then, is not whether one should exclusively choose life design or lifehacking, or bottom-up versus a top-down approach. Used in combination, they are two parts of a powerful personal strategy to balance and gain control of life and work.
Adrian Koh is a writer, blogger, life designer, and budding life coach. He writes for Whakate , and loves no-nonsense, down-to-earth personal development tools that get people working at their peak. Above all, Adrian loves spending time with his family, who he believes makes life worth living for. More about Life Design the Whakate Way.
Thanks Adrian for the guest post!
Striking the balance between bottom-up and top-down has always been a struggle to me.
Many years ago — back in the time that 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was my main personal development influence — I tried many times to define/manage my life from the top to bottom. Yes, I am one of those who sat down and tried to define life mission, values, and all that stuff. The process always felt awkward and it never made a real difference in my life.
Then, with Getting Things Done and many “lifehacking” influences, I totally embraced the bottom-up approach — to the point of dismissing the top-down approach as “fluffy”. Just like you, I realized that it feels good to pull off time-saving tricks and stunts: we feel in control, and that can turn into an addition.
Only recently I realized that, just as you mention, I need both approaches. Indeed, for the last few months, balancing these approaches has been an active concern of mine — one that I think about at least weekly, during my reviews.
Thanks again for bringing up that topic. Just as for you and me, I believe this is relevant to many people who may have tried both approaches but couldn’t find a satisfactory solution in either of them.
Hi Luciano,
I can relate with you at this point. I have also read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and wrote my roles, mission statement, values and so on…but it didn’t made much of impact. Although I applied most of principles in the book, but still, it’s quite hard for me to apply all other stuff (mission, values, roles).
Recently I have felt for Jim Rohn (worth to check him out). His clear and simple communication style makes it easy to understand how we should manage our life.
It would be very interesting if you could share with everyone, with your personal development influence at this moment.
Glad to know I’m not the only one…
Regarding Jim Rohn, I am not familiar with him at all — will research about him out. Thanks, Andrea!
This is a very interesting post. I’ve never really given that much thought to the two subjects (though I should!) and your analysis of them has been very helpful to me. I’m looking forward to seeing others’ opinions on the topic!
“…the central idea is this: life should be lived consciously and deliberately, and not left to chance.”
After 20 years writing about this stuff and teaching it – for women from a “comfort” perspective, I often struggle to define what it is I do – and why “life hacks” can be band-aids. Thanks for expressing it so beautifully!
Great perspective. There’s a lot of talk lately about little life hacks and life tweaks one can implement to get more out of their time and generally get more out of the day to day experience of being human. So much of the writing on the subject seems to deal with these tweaks in a vacuum, as if one change in one area would not effect everything else in some small way. This post illustrates how you have to look at the whole picture before you start making changes, and even that exercise, the summing up of our self and our desires, is an exercise in self development.
Definitely an interesting and useful post.
“Life should be lived consciously and deliberately, not left to chance.”
In the Chinese culture, especially with the Tao philosophy, one should live consciously – knowing where he/she is and be aware of what’s around. Then, go with the flow of life without losing sight of who you are and what you want to achieve.
As the future unfolds, you should be constantly adjusting and aligning yourself with the flow, taking opportunities that comes along, and enjoying the journey.
So, what is my view to the post?
An approach or framework is useful. But at the core of it, you have take charge of your life and cultivate the right mindset.
I think the post is a good start for most of us. As you progress along, you may find need to go along different paths.
Recently, I give up the concept of “balance”, as it necessary implies a struggle between two or more aspects. Instead, I embrace the thought of dynamically blending and mixing the different aspects of life to generate an ecologically (so to speak) engaging life with internal harmony. This brings to how different aspects can compliment and co-evolve with each other (I know that it may seem a bit confusing at first.)
I’m still experimenting with this thought. It has so far created some enlightening progress for me.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Catus.
I agree with your view about “balance”. However, I also believethat the concept is useful at some point of your personal development path. In my view, we can sum it up in a cycle:
First your life is completely unstructured, unbalanced — and you’re unaware of it. Then you start noticing the imbalances and tries to balance your life. Eventually, you outgrow the concept of balance and, in a way, go back to that first stage of living unstructured life. However, this time you’re much more aware, and the balance you explicitly were after becomes “built-in” into your life.
Thanks for the post, Adrian. You make a very important distinction. Another way to look at it:
It doesn’t matter how fast your car can go…
if you’re driving in the wrong direction.
I generally agree with the point “life should be lived consciously and deliberately.” But trying to “not leave things to chance” can lead to great disappointment in life if you’re not careful. By chance I just covered that issue in my recent post The Dangerous Myth of Goal-Setting
Let me know what you think!
Hi Robin,
Just like with the concept of balance (see my reply to Catus Lee’s comment above), I also think that goals may be useful at some point — especially when starting our personal development paths.
As we progress and become more conscious, the goals become more integrated in your life, in a way that you have them, yes, but you don’t need to explicitly “set” them — it becomes more of a process-oriented activity. This second state, just like the first, is “goal-less” — but from a much more mature perspective.
Thanks to everyone for the great insights!
This post is a distillation of everything I’ve been through for the past few years in terms of personal development. For the most part, I’ve been struggling – until I saw how important it was to live consciously.
Thanks to Luciano for the opportunity to write here. It’s been a wonderful experience penning down these thoughts.
“Used in combination, they are two parts of a powerful personal strategy to balance and gain control of life and work.”
- Very well said.
I agree with Robin Krieglstein. Having a plan is good, but one has to be careful not to take the map (the top-down view) for the territory (the bottom-up approach), or, in another way, to put the theory of the plan before the practice of the execution. Ultimately every top-down design has to be implemented in a bottom-up fashion, and it’s there, in the walk of the territory, that one will find the variables, obstacles and surprises (good and bad) that make the difference. Having a plan is important, but one has to take it with skepticism and open eyes, for the future is uncharted territory, and at the end, all plans thought and checked, life is random, and the difference between long term success or failure is often a matter of pure chance. As Lennon wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
And you wrapped up with a great Lennon quote! Nice Thales =)
That’s a brilliant way of putting it, Thales.
Your comment is certainly among the most insightful ever in the blog. Thanks for sharing it with us!
Beautiful post Adrian.
Life-design is about fundamentals, that’s why it looks so steady. There is no shortcuts in life, that’s why we have to pay full price, but at least we know what are we paying for
Hey Luciano.
really liked the way you made the distinction and suggestion for synergy between the two.
the bit on time is super solid but not sure about the phrasing on “embracing your role”. seems a lil “take what you get” as opposed to create and design your roles… THEN embrace them
inspiring stuff all the same.
stumbled!!
regards
alex – unleash reality
To know ONE SELF and control oneself is the first aim of education according to sriaurobindo . But knowing through a scientific test that too comprehensively is an encouraging effort.
This is a false dichotomy. You might as well say,”I don’t think I should be strong, because I want to be fast.” The two are clearly not mutually exclusive, and it is intellectually dishonest to say that they are.
The people I’ve met who are most interested in “life hacks” are those who are already consciously planning their lives. Is it a further expression of curiosity about their world and how to live in it, and a distinctly cosmopolitan view that recognizes how many ways there are to achieve the same end. This is the state of a mind that has engaged in a lot of high-level thinking, not one that sets up needless hurdles or mental Chinese walls.
I think it’s a good thing to discuss high-level planning and lifehacking; they are both worthy subjects. Let’s not pretend they are at war.
I agree, Logan.
That’s why I like the way Adrian build his argument, taking us from this common misconception and clearing everything up during the article — until the last paragraph, in which he makes that point very explicitly.
Know who you are.
Make use of your time.
Get organised.
Embrace your roles.
I’m sorry but this is completely RIDICULOUS.
It is like saying: figure out all the issues in your life and magically understand how to budget your time (when the problem is not knowing how do do so – duh) and know your roles and then – poof – everything will be just dandy!
So frustratingly oversimplified. How can anyone actually relate to or use the information in this post???
Hi Beth,
I can see your point. I do think this is simplified. But we have to note one simple truth:
Something is SIMPLE does not mean that it is EASY.
Like the great teachings of many great minds, simplicity is always there.
I recall a quote from Frank Farelly, “When it comes to action, you have to over-simplify.”
Clarify is not the result of seeing all the complexity, but the ability to see through the complexity and find the real leverages.
Let’s enjoy life!
Hi Catus,
Can you be specific? While I appreciate your comment, there is no there there, as the phrase goes. It seems to be all new-age slognareering.
Just discovered your blog and am busy reading your past posts. I especially liked Tackle Any Issue With a List of 100. I enjoyed Gelb’s book and just ordered Journal to the Self you recommended. Thanks.
I always thought that life hacks were a subset of lifestyle design. I thought life hacks were tools to help you with lifestyle design. Both are important in that sense. Thanks for the article.