I've come to the conclusion that the hardest part of "lifehacking" is what I might call the Principle of Moderate Change.
Essentially, small changes can't be pushed by will alone, because they're easy to make but hard to maintain. They just don't make enough of a difference. If you try to get up 5 minutes earlier every morning, you're not going to become a "morning person". You're going to start making exceptions because there just isn't a real difference between waking up at 7:25 vs. 7:30. Likewise, people who try to "cut back" on cigarettes fail. After a month, they're back to their old rate. Small changes get wiped out if there isn't some long-term, glacial force (not conscious will) pushing them.
From a static perspective, you need enough magnitude in the change to escape the "drainage region" of whatever local optimum you're at, and move into another region. If we take the more featured dynamic perspective wherein those optima might be moving, we see that gradual life changes are happening all the time, but that will power alone is not causing them: the glacial shift in these local optima is what does this.
On the other hand, extreme changes are usually rejected, both by the individual (who never gains confidence in his ability to see the change through) and by people that one intends to influence. The only time people accept these kinds of changes is when there's a sense either of desperation or extreme opportunity, and those are rare circumstances.
So it seems that the most effective way to consciously manage one's life is to make meaningful changes of middling size-- not so small that they get rubbed out by the long-term glacial changes, but not so large that it's impossible to really believe that they will work. I think this is appropriate to self-management and leadership: getting the size of the change right.
The problem with lifehacking is that the appropriate moderate and large changes vary from one person to another, which means that a one-size-fits-all approach won't work. Getting up at 6:00 am will make some people a lot more productive, and others far less. The larger the change, the more individualized this question of appropriateness gets. So "lifehacking" usually focuses on relatively small changes but promises a larger impact. It's not surprising that most of these hacks fail to deliver and end up costing more energy (through constant change and the continual depletion inflicted by unnecessary self-control) than they add in productivity.
Essentially, small changes can't be pushed by will alone, because they're easy to make but hard to maintain. They just don't make enough of a difference. If you try to get up 5 minutes earlier every morning, you're not going to become a "morning person". You're going to start making exceptions because there just isn't a real difference between waking up at 7:25 vs. 7:30. Likewise, people who try to "cut back" on cigarettes fail. After a month, they're back to their old rate. Small changes get wiped out if there isn't some long-term, glacial force (not conscious will) pushing them.
From a static perspective, you need enough magnitude in the change to escape the "drainage region" of whatever local optimum you're at, and move into another region. If we take the more featured dynamic perspective wherein those optima might be moving, we see that gradual life changes are happening all the time, but that will power alone is not causing them: the glacial shift in these local optima is what does this.
On the other hand, extreme changes are usually rejected, both by the individual (who never gains confidence in his ability to see the change through) and by people that one intends to influence. The only time people accept these kinds of changes is when there's a sense either of desperation or extreme opportunity, and those are rare circumstances.
So it seems that the most effective way to consciously manage one's life is to make meaningful changes of middling size-- not so small that they get rubbed out by the long-term glacial changes, but not so large that it's impossible to really believe that they will work. I think this is appropriate to self-management and leadership: getting the size of the change right.
The problem with lifehacking is that the appropriate moderate and large changes vary from one person to another, which means that a one-size-fits-all approach won't work. Getting up at 6:00 am will make some people a lot more productive, and others far less. The larger the change, the more individualized this question of appropriateness gets. So "lifehacking" usually focuses on relatively small changes but promises a larger impact. It's not surprising that most of these hacks fail to deliver and end up costing more energy (through constant change and the continual depletion inflicted by unnecessary self-control) than they add in productivity.