The internet culture archive Know Your Meme states that the term "life hack" was coined by tech journalist Danny O'Brien on October 23rd, 2003 on his blog Oblomovka where he described his research for an upcoming talk on the subject, which took place during February 2004's Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California.

Interestingly, O'Brien directed people to a message board seeking suggestions about their personal shortcuts, as well as the names of people he could interview about these hacks, and one of the first people mentioned in the conversation was the late Aaron Swartz, who kept a detailed log of his online activity.

In September 2004, Gawker Media registered the domain name Lifehacker.com and in 2005 the website was launched with Gina Trapani as the lead editor. The first hack that the site offered was a "word stemmer" tool that worked with the social bookmarking site Del.ici.ous to clean up similar tags and remove duplicates within a user's account.

Now, "life hack" can mean virtually everything. The term is tossed around mercilessly and as you can see from this list, this has also led to it becoming a meme. But at least it's a pretty good one!