My Happiness Project

March 5, 2015

Okay, so I just finished reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin – I have to say, I loved it! The basic premise is that the author dedicated a year to figuring out what would improve her quality of life and, essentially, make her happier. She calls it her “happiness project.” She starts off by saying:

A “happiness project” is an approach to changing your life. First is the preparation stage, when you identify what brings you joy, satisfaction, and engagement, and also what brings you guilt, anger, boredom, and remorse. Second is the making of resolutions, when you identify the concrete actions that will boost your happiness. Then comes the interesting part: keeping your resolutions.

For me, one really important part of the book was mentioned in the preparation stage – just defining what brings me joy and what things don’t. And figuring out what is really important to me and what things I can do without.

I got up one Saturday morning about a week or so ago, and I just started writing out my goals/resolutions, and things that I felt like I really wanted to devote more time to. It was actually a little harder than I thought. Just figuring out what I want in life took some serious purposeful thought. Why is that? I think it’s too easy nowadays to just float through each day and not really think about the Big Picture. 

This is a subject touched on in Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey has a time management grid in which basically all of your activities can be sorted into. They are sorted based on urgency and importance. An urgent task might be attending to a crying child or answering a phone call, or of course, attending to some sort of emergency. Important tasks are… things that you have identified as important to you (think back to stage one of the Happiness Project).

 Basically what he (Covey) found is that people spend more time on the urgent tasks (quadrants I and III) than the important tasks. I personally also feel like it’s easy to fill a lot of our time with QIV activities, which can be labeled as “time-wasting” activities. (This tends to be a problem for anyone with a Netflix account.)

 Quadrant II is where it’s at and where we find things like:

• Vacations
• Goal setting
• Relationships
• Exercise
• Relaxation

Those seem like things worth spending some time on. And I would hate to sacrifice those things for things like watching t.v. or even for necessary things like doing the laundry – (let’s face it, the laundry will still be there tomorrow).

 So, I have narrowed down everything into 10 goals, or themes, and would like to take the next 10 months to focus on each goal one-at-a-time. However, it seems kind of strange to me to spend so much time and effort on a goal one month, just to totally disregard it the next month.

Instead of having a different goal each month, I would like to build upon my goals, and add one each month instead of replacing it. Will this be harder? Yes, but I think if I have successfully made my goal a habit in a month’s time, that I would like to keep it up for good.

Okay, so here they are:

Erica Pye’s Happiness Resolutions

1. CONNECT WITH GOD
2. BE ERICA
3. BE A GOOD WIFEY
4. BE HEALTHY
5. BE POSITIVE
6. LIVE SIMPLY
7. BE A LEADER
8. MAKE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE THAT MATTER
9. DREAM BIG
10. BE PERFECT

I know what you’re thinking about that last goal… just stick with me for 10 months and I think you’ll feel differently about it. So here goes nothing – hope you’ll come along for the ride!