The most popular (realistic) life hacks

A good tweet thread can really make you think. Yannick Veys posted a question on Twitter: What’s your biggest life hack?

My biggest life hack is this: your day starts the night before.

You can set up tomorrow before you go to bed by setting your priorities, figuring out the most important task you want to get done, and thinking about what order you want to do each task in. If I get the one thing done tomorrow that’s a huge priority, then everything else is a bonus. The challenge you have is when you try to get lots done, and end up getting nothing done.

Certain tasks have an overwhelming built-in resistance to them. When I had to plan the day I was going to propose to my partner, I avoided it. It’s hard. I wanted it to be special. I didn’t want to screw it up or fumble my words.

Now I have to plan the “getting married part.” This comes with built-in resistance too. So, I chunked it down. Getting married (for me) involves the day we sign the paper at the government building, a dinner with friends to celebrate, a ridiculously long honeymoon to the Great Barrier Reef, and a visit to China after covid to meet the other side of the family.

When I think of getting married with that lens it feels doable, despite the resistance. I plan each task the night before. Then when I wake up I already know what I’m doing, so procrastination is less likely to strike.

“One sh*tty draft” is my mantra to perform one low-quality task that builds momentum for the day. With momentum you can get a lot more done.

Now you know mine, let’s explore. I trawled through all the responses to Yannick’s question (see the full list here) to extract the best life hacks you can steal for yourself.

The unexpected #1 life hack

I expected the list of life hacks to be fancy. They weren’t. It’s how they are presented that’s most interesting. Here’s the one that has been mentioned an overwhelming number of times:

Make it non-negotiable to get 8-hours of sleep.

Get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep per night at consistent times. In a year, you’ll be functioning in the top 1% of all Americans. — David Menzie

Smile and be friendly to security guards, cleaners, waiters, etc

I had a cleaning job as a youngster. It made me appreciate service workers. Smiling helps you put aside whatever privilege you might have. They could be you. You could be them. Nobody knows what life has in store for you.

When you’re friendly to those who can help you and those who can’t, hidden opportunities appear. People talk behind your back about how you treat people. When you treat people well it spreads like wildfire and you get asked to do more cool stuff, without knowing why.

Eat fruits and veggies

What you eat determines your energy. If you eat crap you feel like crap. You know this to be true. Go and eat two McDonalds meals.

Then come home. Do you feel like taking a nap or going for a ten mile run? You know the answer.

Food is energy. Choose energy-producing food to live better.

Write down your thoughts

Lots of people mentioned writing in different ways as a life hack. If writing is a life hack then my entire life is a life hack. Writing has slowly changed my life over time. When you write down your thoughts you become clearer about what you want and who you are.

You can’t lie as easily to yourself when you’re capturing your thoughts. Now, when you capture your thoughts and publish them publicly like I do, you get a whole different level of accountability.

Accountability is good for you. The number one person you fool is yourself. When people see your thoughts they’ll give you unsolicited feedback. So, use Twitter to share micro-thoughts as a life hack.

Pro tip: write down the same thought again and go deeper. Every time you riff on a thought it starts to attach itself to other thoughts. It’s why I write about finance so much because I’m challenging myself.

You can write to prove an opinion. You can want people to agree with your opinion. Or you can simply write to make people think regardless of whether they agree — I choose this option.

Anything which costs your peace — don’t do that

You can divide your life up into what gives you peace and what takes it away? When I argue over revenue-focused conversations, I lose my peace. When I read a book, I gain back my peace. When I go for a walk in nature, I amplify my peace. When I consume crypto twitter, I lose my peace again.

All you need to do is choose peace more often to quietly change your life.

Don’t set out to be perfect. Just put in the reps.

Doing life reps is half the battle. If you can build a useful habit and do it over and over, then the places you can go in life are endless.

Half of life is simply showing up, even when you don’t feel like it. That’s what it’s like to be a writer too.

Think of goals in 5-year blocks full of daily reps.

Drink a lot of water

This sounded like cliche advice to me. Then I read a blog post called “I Drank A Gallon Of Water A Day For Better Skin — & Here’s What Happened,” written by Maria Del Russo.

Wow. Mind blown. For a guy who grew up with terrible acne-infested skin, the experiment of drinking more water, inspired by this blog post, was a game-changer. Maria reported having much higher energy levels too. All she changed is how much water she drank.

It is chronic water shortage in the body that causes most diseases of the human body — Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj (Source: The Healing Power of Water Book)

Spend more time on Twitter than Instagram to learn more

Instagram is where you go to compare your life to others and feel terrible about yourself. You probably won’t learn anything from a picture of a travel destination, or a person half nude begging for likes, or the numerous photos of luxury items you don’t actually need.

Twitter is a great place to learn. You can start conversations with Elon Musk. You can consume short tweets that make you think. You can follow people who are far smarter than you and borrow their life lessons. Youtube is also good if you like free learning. I use Youtube to study finance from channels such as Real Vision.

Wake up early (5 AM is the most common response)

I can hear the self-help haters coming for me. Waking up early featured in many of the responses. Waking up early is a life hack because while the world is still sleeping in, you can get ahead by working when it’s quiet. For many, that’s 5 AM. For others it’s 7 AM because their family sleeps until 8 or 9.

Waking up early is a feeling. You feel like you have more time even though you don’t. The early hours are when your mind is at its peak because it’s just been rested. The world hasn’t poked holes in your brain continuously yet in the early hours of the morning (that comes later). The world hasn’t punched your brain with life problems you get via email yet, either.

So why not wake up early and see what you can get done?

Bringing it all together

Life hacks help you work towards your 1–2 big goals. They’re snippets of strategies you can implement without a Harvard Education. Life hacks simply help you get things done and solve problems. Experiment with life hacks to level up your life.

Let’s finish on this life hack: Make the roughest drafts of anything you’re putting off.

This article first appeared on Medium.