Interview with LifeHacker guru
Here are some notes from the interview with Gina Trapani, the editor of LH.
If you could have a Lifehacker course become a mandatory part of an MBA program, what sorts of things would it include?
My mandatory MBA Lifehacker course would cover three things: how to install a personal organization system into your life, automate and streamline repetitive tasks, and firewall your attention. In school we learn facts and figures and problem-solving and case studies, but not how to manage our own time and attention and the best ways to turn inputs into output.
Why such things couldn’t be taught in school indeed? I need to teach my kids these things while they’re young and learn quick :)
Also:
What is your take on multitasking? And what are your primary tools for dividing, or focusing, your attention?
There’s good multitasking and there’s bad multitasking. The good kind involves running background tasks while you do something else — like the washer doing a load of laundry while you’re straightening up the living room, or your computer backing up its data while you answer email. The bad multitasking is the constant scanning and switching from one thing to another — like checking email every three minutes while you’re writing a report. The cost of switching between those too tasks is high, and the quality of your work suffers.
I completely agree but I think good multitaksing requires good self-organization so you can schedule your day to make things happen in parallel.
Great interview: powerful and laconic. LH is a great site as well. I would re-subscribe to lifehacker’s feed again if it weren’t 50 posts a day — my RSS reader gets overloaded. Is there a “the daily best of lifehacker” feed?
