The term portmanteau was first applied to words by the author Lewis Carroll—the pen name of the English mathematician and deacon Charles Dodgson—in his 1871 book Through the Looking Glass. At the time, a portmanteau simply meant a kind of suitcase (from the French porter, “to carry”; and manteau, “cloak”), but Carroll used it to describe “two meanings packed up into one word.” That is, the practice of blending two different words into a single new one: “motor” and “hotel” becoming motel, for example.38
Today, both portmanteaus and their more conventional cousins, compound words (which combine two terms in their entirety), remain a popular way of suggesting the collision between old and new frames of reference. One such word, complete with its own much-visited web address, is lifehacking—as seen at Lifehacker.com—a term that neatly embodies not just the modern fondness for compounding, but for steadily extending the compass of computing terms into nontechnological fields.
The idea of lifehacking has been with us since 2004, arriving courtesy of British journalist Danny O’Brien and a session at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference entitled “Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks.” Note that, at this stage, the word lifehack itself didn’t exist. O’Brien used two separate words in a novel combination in order to evoke a particular idea—that some of the most successful members of the new century’s digital elite were using their skills not simply to hack computer systems but to hack life itself.
What these alpha geeks were doing was devising productivity techniques that extended beyond the screen, into their management of all manner of daily tasks: from “batching” similar tasks into set units of time, to using particular productivity software to schedule or coordinate work with others, or to establish particular rhythms of focus on attention-intensive tasks.
One popular technique among programmers for achieving focus is known as the pomodoro approach, and was invented in the 1980s by the productivity expert Francesco Cirillo, much of whose work is devoted to improving the working practices of software development teams. Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato, and the technique takes its name from an iconic Italian tomato-shaped kitchen timer, which is used to break up work into twenty-five-minute periods of intense focus on a single task punctuated by five-minute breaks.
Each cycle of 25 + 5 minutes is defined as a pomodoro, and the idea of “doing pomodoros”—usually in sets of four—has become standard practice among many programmers. It has also become a technique used outside of computing circles: a practice that’s emblematic of the influence of the hacking mentality on life as a whole. This, more than anything else, is the essence of the term lifehacking today—a sign that the logic and techniques of managing our machines are increasingly becoming a model for successfully managing modern living itself.