When Life Hacks Get it Twisted

I love those "Life Hacks," but, sometimes, the best thing I get from them is a good laugh. Some things (in my life anyway) are just un-hackable. Maybe certain areas of my life are just not to be tamed. Here are a few hacks that I've run across that don't work so well for me:

Hack: Beating your phone addiction. My Life: Too late. I need a serious intervention.

I'm advised that instead of checking my phone first thing in the morning, I should spend my time "organizing my thoughts." Yeah. Okay. That would be great - if I didn't need my phone to wake up in the first place. I not only use my phone as a morning alarm, I sometimes use it as a noise machine for getting to sleep in the first place. (I love my phone so much that, if it had warm toes, I'd snuggle with it.) Once I do get up and think I might be able to function, I need my phone to outline my day. I even use this app (sometimes) so that I have something talking to me. (My phone is the only thing that wants to have a conversation with me before I've had coffee.) A few more years of becoming any more dependent on our phones, I imagine some of us will forget to breathe without Siri or her boyfriend reminding us. (By the way, is it sad that I've been thinking of naming my phone? Some days, I think of her as "Lou." Some days, I just call her "unresponsive bitch.")

Hack: Having "organizing stations" around our home. My Life: If I was that organized, I wouldn't need this.

This hack made me actually stop reading to roll my eyes. First off, there are 11 of these suggested stations. Eleven! Come on now. With my illness, I have the attention span of a toddler. I read the first one and started skimming the rest. Here are the listed stations: Mail/Correspondence, Wardrobe, Fix-it, Cleaning House, Gift Wrap, Charging, Bag Drop, Child's School, Recycling, Car Travel, Health/Wellness.

Well, damn. I had to rest after just going through the list. Talk about needing a Health/Wellness station... Actually, I have every one of those so-called "stations." They just aren't exactly organized. I even have a Child's School station (and no kids). That's for all the coloring books and pieces of crafts I collected when I was recuperating and learning to talk again in complete sentences. Some of the stations are just crazy. (A sister-in-law of mine did once have a Gift Wrap room, but she had a 20,000 square foot house. I guess she needed to do something with a good hunk of it to keep me from moving in.) I didn't even check to see what a Bag Drop station is. Unless it's where I keep my big Bed, Bath & Beyond bag of Walmart and Target bags... ~shrug~ What the hell ever.

Hack: Motivation to show up at work. My Life: I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.

Right now, there are days I dream of getting back to work. This whole idle lifestyle is the pits when you are too broke to turn idle time into fun. When I was working, I had all the motivation I needed: house note, car payment, $200 a month shopping habit and, oh yeah - mouths to feed. When I first saw this hack, I instantly remembered my mother and what she would say when I'd complain about my job: "You better get your happy ass up and get to that office. Hungry trumps tired any day." (I laughed so hard, I got a cramp. I really miss my mother!)

By the way, I actually did get a great tip from this hack. I will now be using the "Hemingway Technique" when it comes to writing.

Since I get a daily email feed of hacks, I could go on and on, but you get my point. You can hack some things, but life is, after all, life. Part of the adventure is to live it raw. Of course, I will take help where it helps.

Peace
--Free