The term
life hack was coined in 2004 during the
O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in
San Diego, California by technology journalist
Danny O'Brien to describe the "embarrassing"
scripts and shortcuts productive IT professionals use to get their work done. It is used to describe an inelegant but effective solution to a specific computing problem, such as quick-and-dirty
shell scripts and other
command line utilities that filtered,
munged and processed data streams like
e-mail and
RSS feeds. O'Brien stated "
Hacks are often a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix. And for most people, geeks or not, modern life is just this incredibly complex problem amenable to no good obvious solution. But we can peck around the edges of it; we can make little shortcuts. O'Brien and blogger
Merlin Mann later co-presented a session called "Life Hacks Live" at the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. The two also co-authored a column entitled "Life Hacks" for O'Reilly's
Make magazine which debuted in February 2005. The
American Dialect Society voted
lifehack (one word) as the runner-up for "most useful word of 2005" behind
podcast. The word was also added to the
Oxford Dictionaries Online in June 2011. == See also ==