How not to cure a lifehack addiction

When I was 5, and should have been reading Nancy Drew or, hey, maybe Dr. Seuss, I instead chose to read a parenting how-to book cover-to-cover. In third grade, I wrote a book report on a manual purporting to right the gender imbalance in housecleaning, becoming extremely passionate about the various methods of applying cleaning solution to objects. As you can see, I have a long and kind of weird history with instruction manuals for life. Basically? I love them.

So I was very excited, though wary, to come across a new ultrablog called LifeRemix. Excited because LifeRemix has a bunch of really high-quality partner blogs on board, including Tim Ferriss's Four-Hour Work Week, Chanpory Rith's LifeClever, and Leo Babauta's Zen Habits. Plus, LifeRemix essentially serves up a tasty menu of potential life improvements, constantly scraping all of its member blogs for new headlines, like so:

However, embedded in this nifty setup lies the source of my wariness: with so many potential ways to improve my life, how will I ever pick one?! Or two. Or any number, really, to stick with. After reading this Time article on life hacks a few weeks ago, Hacking Toward Happiness, I found myself nodding with the sober self-awareness of a 20-year-old lifehack addict at the article's observation that "Some life-hacking fans get so wrapped up in reading about efficiency that the sites become, ironically, another procrastination crutch." True that! However, I like to think that the nice glowing optimism I get from reading lifehacks makes it all worthwhile.