Before poststructuralism struck, life was easy. Powers and governmentality were seen as relatively simple things and in order to become one of the good guys, you just had to go to the other side. Then suddenly everything became a process, a discourse that continuously defined and redefined players in the game. New tools were needed for that definition work and among the mightiest of these tools (“power tools”, get it?) are what we call the technologies of the self.
According to Foucault, technologies of the self are the forms of knowledge and strategies that “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”
The cult of productivity is a great example of technologies of the self in action. The promise is clear: A productive workflow will make you a more productive and eventually more successful worker. Success is potentially available to everyone and will lead to happiness.
I’m hardly the first to notice that the plethora of productivity websites (LifeHacker and 43folders are probably just the biggest and most visible examples) that have sprung out of the cult of productivity some time after 2004 produce such an overflow of time-saving solutions that browsing these sites has in itself become a counter-measure to what they promise.
Most (if not all) of these sites can be traced back to a talk given by Danny O’Brien at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California in February 2004. Entitled “Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks”, it collected observations on how productive geeks use simple scripts, text files, and ad-hoc programs to organize their life. Everyone has them and rarely are they talked about: the todo.txt in your home folder, the quickly hacked RSS feed thing to your account balance, the Google calendar for your social life.
Calling these solutions “hacks” is — in a way — an example of applying technologies of the self itself. My favorite definition of “hacking” comes from the 1980s state monopoly time of telecommunication in Germany, when the federal Deutsche Bundespost (then a state organization overseeing all forms of telephony and postal services in Germany) called hacking “atypical user behavior”.
“Atypical user behavior” is such a beautiful definition of “hacking” mainly because it points to the subversive nature of appropriating technology in an unintended way — almost making it sound like something deviant or immoral. Although the minds of the (mainly white, middle-class, male) hackers were not inspired by thoughts formulated in Queer Theory (that surfaced almost a decade later), one is almost tempted to call hacking “queering technology”.
By making ourselves more productive with “life hacks”, we apply technologies of the self: We appropriate technology, we take our lives in our hands — while cleverly hiding the fact that eventually it’s all an attempt to pursue the path of the ruling discourse and its promise of happiness through success.
And yet. And yet. I live out of the tasks I define in “Remember the Milk”, a wonderful webservice that I can access on my mobile phone and in the Web browser. I don’t use a full-blown orthodox GTD system, but I have priorities and contexts, I define projects and due dates for everything from work issues to the most private tasks. I collect and file links that I come across on a typical day on the Internet in Instapaper, where a single click on a bookmarklet keeps me from forgetting them and where I can process them later. I keep notes (like the number of the deck I parked the car at) in Evernote, and again it works from my notebook computer as well as from my phone. In the event of having no gadget or no Internet with me, I write down everything (really everything) in a small black notebook I carry around and put it into my other, electronic, brain extensions later.
It may all be a trick I play on myself. It may all be an application of technologies of the self. But it helps me put structures in my life and it feels creative. These tools eventually are what I use to define myself and at the same time their inherent structures (todo lists, notes) define me.
This is my weblog. I write about projects and stuff I build in my spare time, be it code or tinkering with physical objects. You can find out more about me on my 
A little tool I wrote and deployed on Google App Engine got quite some publicity recently — well, for a very small tool with an extremely limited target audience of geolocation geeks. The point of 
