Ondrej Holzman Should I borrow it? definition life hacking is defined as "any trick, simplification, ability or innovative method that will increase productivity and efficiency in any aspect of life". And that's what this year's iCON Prague was all about. Many come to the National Technical Library to be inspired and learn how to use the latest technology to make their lives easier, perhaps not realizing that life hackers have been around for a long time. Just everyone on a different level…
The term life hacking appeared in the 80s in the struggle of the first computer programmers who used various tricks and enhancements to deal with the huge amount of information they had to process. However, times have moved on and lifehacks are no longer only various scripts and commands used exclusively by geeks, we all already "hack" our lives today, if we are to talk about modern technologies. Let's say "mechanical hacking" has obviously been around since time immemorial, after all, man is an inventive creature.
When it appeared what this year's iCON Prague was going to be about, the term "life hacking" looked attractive, modern, for many it was a completely new expression that could raise great expectations about what it would actually be about. The goal of the Prague apple conference was not to present life hacking as a new, revolutionary trend, but rather to draw attention to and highlight it as a definite trend of the present time. Today, practically everyone is involved in life hacking. Anyone who owns a smartphone, tablet or other device that, for example, calculates the number of kilometers traveled per day.
Just have a smartphone in your pocket and if you pay more attention to your daily routine, you will find that it helps you in different ways in almost every situation. And of course, I am not referring to "primitive" functions such as calling or writing messages. I dare say that almost everyone who visited iCON was already a life hacker, but everyone was in different stages of "development".
As this year's iCON has shown many times, moving to the next level of development in life hacking does not have to be difficult at all. One only had to look at the style of lectures of most of the speakers. Instead of large laptops, many only brought iPads with them, and instead of stereotypical PowerPoint presentations, they used the device as such to engage the audience, either when demonstrating specific mechanisms or for a simpler presentation of the context by projecting thought maps, even in the live broadcast of created ones. This is also essentially a lifehack, although with most modern speakers these are completely automatic habits.
After all, showing just this was not the main goal of iCON. The visitors from the first year could already know that iPads are used to effectively present themselves, now it was up to the speakers to show how to move your life a little further not only with iPads. Tomáš Baranek, a well-known columnist and publisher, gave the audience an absolutely exhaustive lecture about dozens of his hacks on all kinds of devices, and then showed that it is possible to control an entire company, such as his Jan Melvil Publishing, with the help of an iPad.
The photographer Tomáš, on the other hand, appeared in front of the audience only with an iPhone, from which he vividly showed the current state of iPhoneography and what we can do with the camera and applications in the iPhone. After last year's presentation, Richard Cortés appeared in front of the curious audience again, showing where the possibilities for drawing illustrations on Apple mobile products have moved and that he can draw a caricature for the current article on a tram seat and immediately send it on for processing. And there is much more. Music can be created very effectively on the iPad, and a few years ago it was unthinkable that an avid gamer like Mikoláš Tuček would perform with the iPad as an often satisfying game "console".
So it's clear that the iPhone and iPad are irreplaceable life hacker tools. But time moves quickly and as both mentioned apple products have quickly and effectively wedged themselves into our lives, new areas of technology are already being explored that could move our everyday life a little further again, that is if we take the acceptance and use of all kinds of enhancers as a shift forward.
And this year's iCON Prague was ready to talk about the apparently very near future. The next evolutionary stage of life hacking is certainly the phenomenon called "quantified self", in other words measurement and self-measurement of all kinds. Inextricably linked to this are so-called "wearables", devices that can be worn on the body in some way. Their big fan Petr Mára showed a whole constellation of such products at iCON, who tested almost all bracelets and sensors available on the market, with which he measured everything from the number of steps taken to sleep quality to heart rate. Tom Hodboď then added his findings from the use of smart bracelets during sports, because they can serve as a great motivational element.
The ability to check how active you were during the day and whether you met your goal, the ability to control the quality of your sleep and wake up when it is most suitable for your body, the ability to monitor your health. Today, all of this may seem useless to many, but in a few years, measuring anything will become another common part of our lives, and life hacker-pioneers may again be looking for something new. But now "wearables" are here, and it remains to be seen who will win the great battle for our fingers, wrists and arms in the coming months.
I wonder what Apple will introduce in June, if it will be a really smart watch or just a monitoring bracelet.
Thanks Tom, very clear tricks. Although I didn't have the opportunity to hear you, everything is clear from the PDF, really good! We deal with a lot of things in a similar way...
I will blog about it soon. Thanks for the kind words.
also thank you for the presentation, unfortunately I couldn't do it this year, so I would also like a link to the blog :)
It's just being created, but it will be soon :)
and may I ask what causes it? I've gone through a lot of programs but I'm still missing something..
if you're wondering what the presentation was about: it was the Goodnotes app for iOS. But in order to make clickable links, I had to use the PDFPen Mac app. The blog is created on the postach.io platform (blogging from Evernote).
thanks for the tip .. i have evernote for a long time but i keep learning new and new things :))
The lecture looks really cool. Thanks for sharing :) I personally failed to pass ICON - a combined problem of distance and deadline. We've been using Highrise for a few years and I've occasionally used Basecamp, which I like a lot and was intrigued by the whole company part of Basecamp. Is it really so? How do you handle business cases? Can you replace CRM with Basecamp?
We use Highrise for CRM. Unfortunately, it will be ending because Basecamp, Inc. wants to focus only on the product of the same name.
I just launched lifehacky.cz. Wink. :)