I’m sitting here next to a stack of the new Lifehacker book, Upgrade Your Life, and it’s time to start clearing out this joint, signing these puppies and giving them away! Send us your best life hack—organisational strategy, computer tip, DIY project—and earn a chance to have one of these books signed and shipped to your door. Email us your submission to bookcontest at lifehacker.com and over the next couple of weeks, we’ll feature the best hacks here on the site, and give the winners an autographed copy of the book. Get more details after the jump.
You’ve cleared out some time, you’re itching to tackle that cluttered and messy closet, and … 20 minutes later, you’re reminiscing over some old photos you found. Staying on track while tackling organisation projects can be tough, as your ideas and findings pull you in many directions at once. Real Simple’s suggestion: Put an alarm clock in the room where you’re working and set the buzzer to go off 10 minutes after you start. When it beeps, assess what you’ve done and then hit the snooze button. When it goes off again, see if you’ve accomplished more in the next chunk of time. Keep hitting the snooze button until you’re finished with your project. People who can hyper-focus will find this method really annoying and won’t want to use it. But, if your mind frequently wanders, this could be a great tool for you.
Tech blogger Dan Warne notes that MacBooks loaded with serious memory—like MacBook Pros with more than 2 GB—can take a long while to activate these days, since the entirety of that memory is being written to your hard disk in the default “safe sleep.” If you’re almost always plugged into a wall socket or aren’t the type to run your battery down entirely, Warne recomments a one-line Terminal hack that brings back the old swift-moving sleep:
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Some browsers let you set up auto-complete information for all the Name/Address/City/Password forms you fill out on a regular basis, but often with a “do it all or don’t do it” functionality. Free Firefox add-on InFormEnter is a better implementation of that automated function. The add-on automatically places small icons next to every form space, but you’ll likely want to turn that off and use the right-click functionality to fill in data from any of the profiles you can fill out—nice for creating anonymous personas for sites you don’t quite trust. InFormEnter is a free download, works wherever Firefox does. InFormEnter [Firefox Add-ons via Demo Girl]