Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better

Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better
by Gina Trapani

Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better
List Price: $29.99
Category: Book
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Book Summary Information

Author: Gina Trapani
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-17
ISBN: 0470238364
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Wiley
Product features:

Book Reviews of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better

Book Review: Worth its weight in iPhones
Summary: 5 Stars

I was a big fan of the first edition of Gina's LifeHacker. "Upgrade Your Life" is the expanded, revised, resized and renamed Second Edition, which should make it more accessible to the self-described "non-hacker."

The book's new dimensions and title make it look less like a computer book and more like the self-improvement book that it is. To the uninitiated, "lifehacker" sounds like something Dr. Frankenstein dabbled in, where "upgrade your life" could have come from Tony Robbins. These are small changes, but "small changes" for improving your productivity is what this book is all about.

The book is not designed to read front to back. Each "hack" has a a "level/platform/cost" header, which I find helpful, but I would have liked to have some or all of this info in the table of contents. Otherwise, the ToC is excellent, organizing the Hacks by productivity type ("Clear your mind," "firewall your attention") and descriptive Hacks and subtopics of each hack. At times, just reading the ToC is enough to set off the "a ha!" reaction and make a difference. For example, "remember 100 different passwords with one rule set" was enough to change my approach to passwords, even before I'd read the full text.

Many of the tips are simple common sense, which we can often miss because of habits we've already built up. Other tips introduce useful applications like Remember the Milk, or remind you of features your phone already has (Hack 72, "Access web apps and search via text message").

Gina is an excellent writer; her LifeHacker.com site remains a daily read. A lot of these tips have been covered on the site before, but having them available in compact, physical form is particularly helpful when I'm stuck on a project or assignment and need to make a mental break. Just learning something new and practicing it for a few minutes often helps me get back into the productive zone.

Highly recommended.

Summary of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better

Whether youre a Mac or Windows user, there are tricks here for you in this helpful resource. Youll feast on this buffet of new shortcuts to make technology your ally instead of your adversary, so you can spend more time getting things done and less time fiddling with your computer. Youll learn valuable ways to upgrade your life so that you can workand livemore efficiently, such as: empty your e-mail inbox, search the Web in three keystrokes, securely save Web site passwords, automatically back up your files, and many more.

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