If you put an onion in the freezer for about half an hour before processing, you can avoid tears over the cutting board, because the cold does not produce the substance that irritates the eyes – a simple trick that solves an everyday problem faced by many people. This is what is known as a life hack!
IT and tech journalist Danny O’Brien first merged the words “live” and “hack” in his 2004 lecture of the same name, “Life Hacks – Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks. “31 In doing so, he presented simple tricks and shortcuts that IT specialists use to work more effectively in the data jungle, calling them life hacks. A year later, the American Dialect Society even shortlisted the word for Word of the Year in the “useful” category, with life hack losing out to “podcast “32. Nevertheless, the word has since been used with great pleasure and has even triggered a whole life hack hype, because the word is now used in a variety of ways – for example, there are categories called “lifehack “33 in many TV shows or magazines – and the word “life hacks” has been further developed: Life hacks no longer exist only for the IT scene, but for a wide variety of areas, such as “start-up hacks “34.
Pronounced the same but spelled differently, by the way, are so-called “live hacks”, where hackers decrypt something live, i.e. in real time – don’t get confused!
How do digital transformation and life hacks fit together? The story of its creation already shows it: In order to be able to work efficiently and more easily, knowledge can be shared and made available through lifehacks, so that everyone’s everyday life in the digital environment is made easier. At the same time, knowledge also reduces fear of contact, so that life hacks can be used to disseminate knowledge from the digital sector.
31 Web – https://lifehacker.com/interview-father-of-life-hacks-danny- obrien-36370, 04/17/2021
32 Web – https://www.americandialect.org/Words_of_the_Year_2005.pdf, 17.04.2021
33 For example, Stern magazine: Web – https://www.stern.de/ panorama/knowledge/lifehacks/, 16.04.2021
34 Book – Start-up Hacks: What Really Moves Companies Forward, Bern- hard Kalhammer (Redline Verlag 2019)
