Life Hacks - Lets Clear this up. You have been lied to.

About once or twice a week I have a link pop up on my facebook feed. ‘Life Hacks for your home’, ‘Life Hacks for your kids’ etc. I can only admit that there are some awesome ideas. But how many of them will actually help you? How many of them actually meet the definition of a ‘Life Hack’?

Taking to Google to define a ‘Life Hack’ seemed the most obvious choice of starting points…

Life Hack

Informal Noun

Definition: A strategy or technique adopted to manage one’s time and daily activities in a more efficient way.

If we go by this definition, I think there are a number of bloggers who have completely misinterpreted ‘Life Hacks’. Now do not get me wrong, I do not claim to be an inventor of life hacks, but I am a whizz with a search engine.

Our first visit is to the website that got my thinking – it appeared on my facebook feed earlier.

Viralnova.com

Now this website got off to a pretty good start. Using a post-it note is a pretty good fix to clean your keyboard. 

I am a bit of a post-it hoarder and both my home and work desks have a large number of these things hidden in corners of desk drawers. So using these to clean your desk saves you going out to buy something specific to clean and collects all the dust on the sticky end – so very efficient.

Again, idea number three – using paper clips to easily find the end of your tape – is also a pretty smart idea. It saves wasting tape through folding over the corner and we all have spare paperclips around the desk. There are also another few ideas (7/9/10/12/16/18/20/21/22) that do fit into ‘Life Hack category’.

However, some of the ideas create more work for the potential ‘Life Hackee’. Idea number 2 is great for someone who loves recycling. Fashioning your used toilet roll tubes into seed pots does not help you manage your time effectively. It will only make additional work for you. My granddad saves time planting seeds into individual pots by filling an old plastic box with compost and adding seeds. He is nearly 90 and apparently has a better grasp of ‘Life Hack’. Please save your cardboard tubes for idea number 7 (cables lose in a drawer is a nightmare!).

The status of ‘pretty clever idea’ can go to ideas 4, 5, 13 (although standard clothes pegs are cheaper to use than going out and buying trouser hangers), 15 (any sealed plastic container will work just as well… or perhaps recycle an old sweet jar…) and 23. Ideas 6 and 17 are awesome interior design ideas. However, it would be just as easy to stick a blob of blue-tack on your wall then the idea with a tennis ball. The makeup brush holder looks fab with the coffee beans, but it would be cheaper and easier to use sand or something (or just a jar?). Hack 8 – charging your phone in aeroplane mode. In this mode it can’t send or receive messages. It will charge quicker (as less battery is being used), but the only feasible benefit is if your phone takes AGES to turn off and on again. Number 19: using a lazy susan in the fridge is pretty clever, but not very space efficient. What will you do with the corners? 

Note: How to tie a tie (14) is a not a life hack. That is something I had to learn when I was 4. It is just something you need to know how to do. Like ironing (although my husband brought me a trouser press as I end up adding creases with an iron….). Life Skill, not Life Hack.

So a quick Google search lead me to a facebook page (1000 Life Hacks) that is dedicated to supposedly posting ingenious ideas to make your life easier. Having had a look through, there are some pretty good ideas- such as putting lemon or lime juice in shampoo to stop your hair going frizzy. Sounds pretty cool – if anyone can vouch for this please get in touch.

However, at the heart of it, it basically a mixture of ideas that people have recycled from other people. The posts alternate between advice, scare mongering and some really good design ideas

.#1219 – If you listen to music frequently it will reduce the risk of a brain tumour over the course of your life – (http://1000lifehacks.com/post/79589990691)

This really annoyed me. Using ‘science’ to scaremonger is complete pet hate of mine. If they want to post this, they need to post the research. This post had over 100 likes. People, if you see things on the internet it does not mean that it is true.

When I look for ‘Life Hacks’, I want ideas that will actually make my life easier. I want them to fit the definition. Internet users, bloggers are using this term because they know it will lead to you searching their page and seeing their content. Do not be fooled.