When people hear the word “hacking,” they usually think of overgrown teenagers in their PJs on their parent’s basement computer breaking into other computers — like at the Pentagon or a bank or a certain private email server. When I talk hacking, it’s the build-a-better-mousetrap approach to working and being productive and doing everything you do.
This kind of hacking is often prefixed by the word “life”: “life hacking.” It really means different things to different people in different professions. Let me talk about what it means to me, as a magazine editor, then throw out a few ideas for what it might mean to drilling contractors.