Nigh on two decades ago, I was a computer programmer at Tandy (formerly Radio Shack, and then Tandy/Radio Shack, later Radio Shack again, and now apparently "The Shack"). Our job was to maintain a little GUI-based productivity suite that shipped with their house-brand computers. And we had a rigorous source-code control system and bug reporting database. . .

Our source control system was named "Janice", and she was a very organized person who maintained all builds and source code versions and backups with a few command-line tools coupled with a lot of batch files.

Our bug-reporting suite was a set of private USENET discussion groups where we'd post bugs and bug-status as replies to threads. Even though newsgroups don't have any structure more rigorous than plain text, we managed to track all bugs and nothing got lost, again thanks to a couple of very organized people who maintained the structure of the newsgroups and made sure that everything was properly formatted and all the little threads of bug openings and attempted fixes and reopenings and closings were documented.

Disaster struck when we moved the project to Windows and decided that, along with the move to a new development environment, we were going to replace those source code and bug organizing people with software that'd do the job for us. We contracted out some custom database software which was written but was then promptly abandoned because we the programmers weren't trained or even encouraged to use it. The old source code-maintainers and bug-newsgroup maintainers spent most of their time maintaining the legacy projects because we had fancy software (which we weren't using) that'd do their job for us.

Mind you, this wasn't the only problem with the project, but it was a biggie. I did eventually leave the company in frustration a few months before a single release of the suite limped into Radio Shack stores just in advance of Radio Shack selling its computer division to AST where it died a quiet death.

Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker guide to working smarter, faster, better (a title that is only slightly shorter than the book itself) is a guide to becoming one of those "very organized people" that I mentioned before. In my little case-study above, you'll notice that it wasn't the software itself that was the problem. It was the assumption that just having software will organize you. The fact that we at Tandy had a complete distributed version control system would, by its very existence, make our project organized. Bug databases are themselves organized so it's not necessary for you to be organized yourself.

And that's no more true than owning a copy of Word makes you a novelist or owning a hammer makes you a carpenter. Your tools are no more effective than you are. And Upgrade Your Life is a pile of 100+ one or two-page "hacks" that can help you become more organized with the tools you already have.

Most of the "hacks" are fairly high-level. For example, hack #41 is "clear your desktop". Your computer's desktop is likely a hive of distractions and dumping ground for files you plan to address eventually. And you should make it your goal to clean it up completely. It even goes as far as suggesting that you disable desktop icons (which you can do in Windows).

Each hack is given a "level" from easy to hard, a platform (Mac, Windows, or both), and a price (most free). If there's a tool that does a similar job on Mac and Windows, like those virtual-desktop programs that let you distribute running programs over several virtual screens, then both are presented and described. There are a few single-platform hacks, like putting your Applications folder on your Mac's dock, but in general they allow you to do a job that you could approximate or that's already available on the other platform. Linux people are generally out of luck except for the web-based and more conceptual stuff.

Chapters are organized under the following sub-headings

• Control Your Email
• Organize Your Data
• Trick Yourself into Getting Done
• Clear Your Mind
• Firewall Your Attention
• Streamline Common Tasks
• Automate Repetitive Tasks
• Get Your Data To Go
• Master The Web
• Hone Your Computer Survival Skills
• Manage Multiple Computers

And some of the hacks under these headings are fairly obvious. You'll certainly see some stuff that you already do. If so, pat yourself on the back and look a little deeper.

As I mentioned before, Upgrade Your Life is fairly specific. And while that means that it's more readily useful than something entirely conceptual like "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Whatevers" books, it also means that techniques in the book will change. Since the book's publication in 2008, Google Calendar (a tool that features prominently in the book) has gone through dozens of minor updates and feature additions. And some of the things that are done in the book will be either done differently or won't be done at all. Some of the little shareware/freeware tools will be superceded by better ones or will find themselves built into later versions of operating systems. And, since we're now operating on "Web 2.0 time", the concept of versions doesn't even exist for some things. If you're printing up a cool trick for Microsoft Word 2007, you can be sure that even if the trick is no longer necessary in Microsoft Word 2011, it'll still be useful for people sticking with Word 2007. If Google Calendar gets an update that changes or eliminates the need for a particular trick, it's gone forever. There's no concept of "Google Calendar 2007" that many people are still using. Everybody's using the latest version, like it or not.

So that means two things. First, this book's got the audacity to print ON PAPER some tricks that might've become obsolete before the book even hit the presses. And that also means that you'll have to read the book ASAP to keep the hot topics hot. Mind you, here are 116 useful organizational topics in this book, and the great majority of them are pretty timeless. Ten years from now, mucking out your desktop and prioritizing your email folders will still be a useful skill.

So, what's this got to do with programming? Well, programming requires you to be organized. And you can't just slap up a version control server somewhere and hope that you'll get by letting the server do the organizing for you. Because it won't. You need to prioritize and organize yourself, your schedule, your email, your files, your projects, your bugs, and your documentation if you want to call yourself a programmer. And getting some of those things organized will spark you getting organized elsewhere. Once your computer's organized, you won't want your revisions all over the place. And you'll suddenly realize that you need to somehow manage your documentation and your bugs and your bug-fixes.

And you'll find yourself making better games. Without even realizing it.