Lifestyle hacking

I am not talking about hacking the computer system. Then I moved here and I also started believing that way. However, it took me couple of months to figure out small hacks that can save some bucks. Not only I save those money but also with the help of some extra money I could explore the magnificent beauty of both Dalarna and Sweden.

Students always want to travel and due to having less money they hardly can do it. Saving money is not that hard as long as one spends money cautiously. One of the best way to save money is to spend less money on fancy restaurants especially when you are a student. Many students have reluctance for cooking their own meal and they rather want to spend money for eating out. Now is the trick. By spending 30 to 40 Swedish Kronor one can experience delicious Swedish cuisine.

Chocolate lover like me can get the best deal in IKEA. You can get three different flavour chocolate bar in IKEA only in 20 kronor. Besides that, they also offer wide range of snacks which is not only good for your Fika but also save some kronor of your wallet. You can get chocolate muffin, Ginger bread, croissant, cinnamon buns over there.

Those are freshly baked and the taste is really good. Back in my home country, we have a week spot for different sorts of sweet dishes. The last service on my list and one that is truly amazing is ManPacks.

This service lets you automate everything as a guy. From boxers to condoms. This company is amazing and their products are of the highest quality. They are consistently adding more items to their site. Click Here For Part Two. Organizing a particular time and place to meet is rather silly if the people doing the meeting all have cell phones and a vague plan.

Utilizing a texting system as an essential productivity tool in a professional environment is a natural extension of normal Net Gen social behavior. The same can be said for social networks such as Facebook, which offer excellent tools for collaborating on complex problem solving and building effective relationships.

Unfortunately, many Baby Boomers have never used Web 2. Such tools simply did not exist when they entered the work force. As a result, they often view such tools as distractions from doing "real" work. Also see Security and the Generational Divide. One high-tech firm did a study on the primary reason for undergraduate offer rejections by prospective new hires and discovered that the number-one reason for rejection was that access to Facebook was blocked.

The firm now offers access to Facebook. Along the same lines, but without a solution to the problem, FS-ISAC survey results from April indicated that over 90 percent of financial service firms block access to social networking sites. The number-one reason for blocking access is a concern over productivity, not security.

Ninety-five percent of the firms responding to the survey have no plans to change policies to allow access to social networking sites. You can see the storm clouds gathering. To restate the conundrum, leaders believe that social networking, instant messaging and using SMS constantly in the work environment will lead to lower overall productivity, so they block access. Net Gen'ers believe that Web 2.

Enter the lifestyle hacker. To sidestep the impasse, a growing number of Net Gen'ers are using their technical savvy to find creative ways of bypassing controls so they can leverage Web 2.

Perhaps an example can make this clear. Dylan not his real name was an intern working in the technology department doing server administration for two years while he completed graduate school.

He then applied for and was hired as an analyst working in the operational risk department. Dylan established himself as an effective contributor to the department over a period of six months. I had posted something asking everybody what their top reasons were for becoming Indie Hackers. Why were they Indie Hackers? You had the number one comment. Which, I started to realize that my ideal lifestyle was one where I have a lot of control on what I work on, sort of choosing from where to work, on choosing what not to work on.

All right, so, I had started searching and it took me a couple of years, two or three years, until I managed to take the plunge and abandoned a career that by every measure, by all metrics was succeeding. I was getting promoted. I was held in high regard at Amazon.

Everyone was telling me I have a very bright future. I was getting encouraged to stay. They were awarding me financially extremely well, way beyond my wildest expectations. Basically, I managed to get to know many people quite closely that had been there either for a long time at Amazon or similar big tech companies.

You home arrive almost as everyone else is going to sleep. It takes all the energy out of you. I think, I left at the beginning of in February without any concrete plans of what I was going to be doing. I was extremely lucky. I think I had a very healthy amount of savings. The ending to your story a lot of people are familiar with.

You keep your schedule open and empty. After a. I never want to write a newsletter. I never want to fill out accounting forms.

But the things that I have an option to not do, even if it comes at the cost of leaving money on the table, leaving opportunity on the table, I think really hard whether I should take them. Sometimes I do take them. We can talk about something that I chose to do. You know, you mentioned newsletters. Initially I thought I would enjoy writing a newsletter every week, but when I find myself trying to do that, I realize that I have nothing to say, nothing I want to talk about.

I put content on a schedule. I can force myself to do that. Basically, I think, to summarize the approach, is I try to optimize for enjoyment and things that I feel I would do anyway for the long sake, as soon as I can afford it, whenever I can afford it.

There are definitely exceptions where I have to do something because it has to be done. But I try to, if I can, eliminate them or if I can, reduce them. I try to. How do you decide in terms of how to use your resources, time, money, attention, so on and so forth? How do you quit something like that, and how do you feel giving that up? No, no. But I think I had been preparing myself mentally. I was happy. You can never say never. Who knows what could happen?

But I left with the expectation that this completely — I completely abandoned that career for me. So explain to me this philosophy of writing off an entire chapter of your life. It reminds me of future authoring, which is this idea that you spend time deliberately authoring your future life. You write about what you want to happen to yourself. You want that character to have a very interesting life so you make riskier or more interesting decisions than you would if you were just viewing yourself in the first person.

So when you talk about closing a chapter of your life, are you literally thinking about yourself as a character in a book, or what are you doing here?

Life is basically, I think the only thing we really control is how we react to things and what decisions we make. I reacted in the best way that I could have. I think something in between giving it up is sometimes mentally giving it up, mentally writing it off. So I definitely understand that. Seneca has this great quote, that we suffer more from our imaginations than we do in reality.

Did I make the wrong choice? But a few things. To be honest, I think imagination helped me as well. The way things happened, my finances improved radically in a very short period of time, and even my sort of career status. Within the span of five years I joined as a junior. I was a senior.

My compensation more than increased five times. The period five years before, it was still fresh in my memory. I started reflecting. How different was my life back then? Sure, I had a smaller house and a smaller car, had fewer material possessions. I used to think a bit harder before upgrading my laptop and my phone and whatever, but is that really it? I mean, how much sacrifice, how many things am I going to trade for this small improvement?

I never thought about it that way when I was there. What can you keep improving? Is it going to materialistically improve my life? If not, I tend to Laughter just give up on it.

Many people thought I was crazy, my family and friends. I remember, I think, a couple of weeks later I went to the dentist. I think with family and friends, when you have the opportunity to describe better, I think people start to get it.

This is what happened when I was explaining it to my colleagues at Amazon in the last week when I told them I was leaving. And many of these conversations ended up taking three hours. We were there until late at night because people are fascinated. Then we started talking and many people had similar thoughts and they started to realize similar things.

People understand it once you start explaining. Did you have a solid plan for how you were going to achieve your goals that you wanted to achieve or what your first steps were going to be? Yeah, so I had a plan which ended up being, in hindsight, I think a mistake. I had a nice spreadsheet where I pretty much started with my savings balance and my sort of expense rate.

I knew the downward slope. Basically I had a series of plans that in my head were the ideal things that I would be doing.

For example, my first preference was to build a SaaS business, go that route. Then the next step was I might try to acquire maybe a small business. I started for the first six months with sort of that assumption, that this was how I was going to work. But then I think about six months in I had a bit of small crisis. How will I decide to pull the trigger and sort of pivot to Plan B? With all that uncertainty about it being hard to decide, it was making me extremely uncomfortable, literally keeping me up at night.

This, I think, was fully active at that time, pinging me to question what I was doing. You get less feedback along the way unless you can find clever ways to build these tiny minimum viable products. So, Userbase emerged when I was still in the mode of believing that I was going to focus on one thing. At the time, I thought that it was probably my best bet to work on something that I understood well. I came from a background of working in databases and software developers and this was a combination of that.

And I enjoy the space. In hindsight, I think I ended up investing a lot more time, a lot more money into it than I would have liked. Nevertheless, the arrangement that I managed to do later, it allowed me to let it take its time, essentially. Basically, more time is beneficial to it.

So what is it, exactly? The idea started, I was exploring some ideas about building inaudible web app. I think you use Firebase for Indie Hackers.