Free and easy

Everyone wants to find shortcuts for tedious tasks. Hence the emergence of a hot new field called 'life-hacking'.

The term originated from the computer software programmer's practice of using deft productivity tricks to organise data. It has now come to mean anything that could help boost personal efficiency in a simple yet clever way. For example, you can 'upgrade' a standard computer monitor to high-definition just by wiping its screen with a damp cloth.

Ho founded Lifehack.org in May 2005 while working as an engineer at open-source software distributor Red Hat. 'I spent usually an hour every night reading books and articles on the internet. I thought that if I properly used time to find good content, I would be able to draw up and share pointers to help other people save time. So that's how Lifehack.org was born,' he says. One of his secrets is to keep track of ideas using the information-capture program Evernote (www. evernote.com).

Ho, who was hailed last year as one of Asia's top young entrepreneurs, has recently formed a startup, Stepcase. Under the new company, the Lifehack blog, which has more than 60,000 subscribers, provides a branding platform for Stepcase's productivity software, targeted at individuals and small businesses.

With Ho's life-hacking acumen as inspiration, the following Hong Kong techies share their tricks for getting things done and feeling better about life.