Though people have always hacked their lives (e.g., Ben
Franklin is claimed as an early example), the birth of “life
hacking” is dated as Danny O’Brien’s session
at an O’Reilly tech conference on 2004-Feb-24.
O’Brien recently shared an earlier manifestation of his interest with
me from 2003-Oct-22. The
QuickTopic is overrun with spam, but if you go to the last page and scan
in reverse order, it reads like what I provide
below—in case the website disappears.
This list doesn’t use the term “life hacking,” so the conference is
still the earliest evidence of the neologism, but it’s an interesting
list with many recognizable names.
O’Brien notes that his current impression of the list was that there
weren’t enough women: “I remember worrying about this at the time, and
being determined to put Sophie Wilson on the list, who was a personal
hero. I don’t think she wrote back, or I was too much of a coward to
write to her.”
Two contributors to the thread that pique my interest are the posts
of “biella” and Aaron Swartz. I
take the first to be hacker anthropologist Gabbriella Coleman. And I knew
Aaron when he was a boy at the W3C,
as a contributor to a number of projects I followed, and a young man who
also frequented the main branch of the Cambridge Library.
In the thread, Aaron discussed his “Activity Log,” and I don’t think
I knew of that though I had started something similar, which I called “Busy
Sponge” in 2002-Aug-21—and a
version of which I continue to use today, seventeen years later!
This is an interesting bit of lifehacking history—and prompt for
personal reminiscing.
There are comments.