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10 February 2006

Life hacks

For those intel professionals still stymied by technology, commuting, and the other hassles of a typical high distraction high stress environment, it may be advisable to take a page from some technology professionals and start exploring life hacks.

The term was first popularized by the technological bleeding edge at the Emerging Technology conference hosted by those most technical of individuals in the O'Reilly network.

It has since come to embrace a number of process and technological improvements to individual information use and productivity. Among the more prolific sources of new life hacks ideas is the blog 43 folders.

Regrettably, many of these depend on individuals being able to control their own technology environment - and many are optimized for open source software / linux / mac systems. Most community professionals are locked into their technologies by security restrictions - and face ever more obsolescent platforms and applications designed under arcane philosophies by the lowest bidder to the least common denominator.

Unless this changes, it will become just another part of the competitive pressures which will slowly render the community unable to keep pace with the contemporary operating environment and increasingly irrelevant to the decision makers - many of whom will have so completely adopted similar specialized life hacks that they will be unwilling (in not completely unable) to slow down to deal with the archaic approaches offered by the community, especially when they have other sources of information and analysis readily available to them.