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When you hear the word "hacking," you generally think of bad people getting into your computer to steal your identity or do things like that.
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That's Whitson Gordon. He is the deputy editor of Lifehacker.com.
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Well, what the word hacking really means is finding a clever way to do something and often that's a clever way to work around an established system.
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And you'd be surprised at how many established systems there are in your own life.
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There is a system for how you get up in the morning and a system for how you check your email. And a system you use for your calendar and on and on and on.
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A lot of us are so entrenched in the systems that we are a part of in the way that we work day to day.
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But we don't realize sometimes there is an easier way to do something.
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And so yeah, hacking into someone's bank account, that's really bad.
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But, hacking into your own life? That can be really good!
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Because, the way that we do things generally sucks.
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Life hacking can range from doing something to your wireless router to get better reception to making your headphones stay better in your ear with a $2 pair of ear plugs.
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It's just little things that make your day-to-day life easier and more efficient.
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So how do I go about hacking systems in my own life?
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The first thing I would do is go about your work as normal and maybe take a little bit of time at the end of each day, just 10 minutes, to think about what you did that day.
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You know, "This point in my day was really inefficient. How can I maybe do that better?"
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Do that every day, you'll start to see where maybe the inefficiencies are in your work.
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You know, maybe you spend way too much time trying to wade through emails or you spend way too much time typing out certain things.
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From there I just have to be really creative and think outside the box. Are there any tricks that you have at that point?
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You say to yourself, "God, I'm spending so much time typing out this tedious stuff all day long."
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You go on to Google. You search for, "How to save yourself time in typing,"and you'll find not just a lot of solutions from people,
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but a lot of actual programs for computers that people have written to deal with that specific problem.
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What would be the purpose behind caring about Lifehacks?
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You know, most of us are wasting, just wasting X percent of our time on tedious tasks or wasting X percent of our money on things we could easily make ourselves
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and by dedicating part of your day to reorganizing your thoughts and rehacking some of these little things that you do every day,
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you can save a ton of time, you know, be more productive, have more time to spend on the things that are really more important.
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- Hi, I'm Jonathan. - And my name is Kirsten. We work here at Epipheo.
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Watching that video made me think, "What are the things I do every day that I could do more efficiently?"
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- Well, you could do crunches while you brush your teeth. - Yeah, after you. - I already do.
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- Wait, really? - Yeah. - Oh, okay.
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So, anyways, we would love to hear from you on your ideas on how you can hack your way to a better life. So, leave us a comment below.
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And we want to thank Lifehacker.com for partnering with us on this video series.
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We here at Epipheo love to make videos that will improve your life, so make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss the next one.