It’s common that once we perfect a task through practise, we tend to stop trying at it. However, a new study from the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that even after learning a task, whether it’s tennis or playing music, continued practising leads to more efficient behaviour. More »
If you have trouble remembering long numbers — like phone numbers — Redditor Fealiks shares a simple way to keep everything straight. All you need to do is assign the numbers to letters, and create a phrase that’s easy to remember — just like you did to learn the planets or order of operations in primary school. More »
For the last year-and-a-half I’ve been learning Spanish. I grew up around Spanish speakers and took the subject in high school. But you know what has really helped with my Spanish language skills? Movies. More »
Many of us at Lifehacker are big fans of video games. Our esteemed Editor-in-Chief, however, is sceptical that gaming offers any value beyond simple entertainment. More often than not, he argues, games are a dangerous time sink. In this post, I hope to convince him — and any of you who may feel the same way about video games — otherwise, arguing that aside from being a great form of entertainment, video games can also relieve anxiety, teach new skills and help you stay motivated. And I’ve got science to back me up. More »
Author Clay Johnson believes that, much like junk food leads to obesity and health problems, junk information is killing our productivity and efficiency, and worse, feeding ignorance. His new book, The Information Diet, discusses this problem in depth. In this post, Johnson details how to kickstart your Information Diet for 2012. More »
Windows/Mac/Linux: When learning a programming language for the first time, it can be difficult to see how lines of code translate to visual elements. Free educational webapp Greenfoot provides a structured sandbox where programming students create ‘actors’ that live in ‘worlds’ to build simulations, games, and and other visual programs. More »
Dear LH, I’d like to try out some sort of martial art, just for fun. I don’t really want to commit to fully-fledged lessons. Is it possible to learn basics using online resources? Thanks, Typical Uni Student More »
One of the biggest differences between the most successful musicians and average players, one study has found, isn’t the amount of time they practice, but how they delegate their time. Creating distinct periods between learning or working and leisure might help you achieve more. More »
Although there are a number of great ways to learn online, most of them cost a bit of money. Treehouse not only offers design and development lessons of exceptional quality — both in production and content — but offers them entirely for free. More »
Clay Johnson regularly writes about the way we consume information at his blog InfoVegan, he’s kindly contributed to Lifehacker about the myth of the multi-monitor productivity boost and he’s currently working on a book called The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. So when Johnson decided to offer a quick overview how an information diet can improve your productivity, we were extremely interested to hear his answer. More »
