Web site of the Week: Lifehacker.com

Jason Hall

It’s that time of the semester again; the time that strikes fear into the hearts of freshman and senior alike: midterms. It just doesn’t seem like there are enough hours in the day to read all those chapters and study all that material.

And procrastinators like you and me need all the help we can get when it comes to buckling down and getting things done. Luckily for us, the folks at Lifehacker.com have years of experience at overcoming the kind of crippling procrastination that plagues most college students. For me, reading Lifehacker is the next best thing to adding six hours to every day.

Like the name suggests, the site’s goal is to find clever shortcuts and time savers for your everyday life. The tips of Lifehacker range from time management and budgeting skills to tips on how to ace a job interview or help stick to a schedule.

A lot of the hints focus on getting the most out of your computer, a notorious time-waster in the age of YouTube and flash games. To that end, Lifehacker’s writers often recommend software to help track your time as well as help perform complex tasks quickly and easily.

The site has so many useful tips that it published a book called Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, which gathers some of its more popular hints.

Some of the more tech-centric tips may be over the heads of the beginning user, but Lifehacker’s writers manage to break things down to be easily understood. Read it for a week, and before long you’ll be an expert at all things productive.

And just in case something isn’t clear at first glance, the writers are almost always available through e-mail to answer any questions you might have. They’re also receptive to any tips you might have stumbled across in your fight against wasted time.

While they can’t sit you down and shove your nose into a book, Lifehacker.com’s contributors can definitely give you ideas to get more done in a day. You’ll thank them when your midterms are over.

Contact ALL correspondent Jason Hall at [email protected].