My Happiness Project

Who doesn’t want to add a little more happiness in their life?

I finished the book “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin.  She is a writer who had a pretty nice life and she felt pretty happy, but there were some things she new that she could/should possibly do to make her life even happier.  So she studied the idea of being a happy person, built a plan, and wrote a blog for a year.  The book is her ideas/insights that bubbled up throughout the process.

I also am a happy person.  And, after reading the book, I am inspired to continue to try to eek out just a little more happiness each day and with each interaction.  And I’ve been doing that.  And I’m pretty much tickled pink all of the time.

Gretchen offered many strategies to handle work-life balance, life-family balance, and home-outside of home balance.  She developed tactics for dealing with clutter, having better conversations with your spouse and children, and how to help start prioritizing how you spend your time with others.  It was some pretty motivating stuff.

One of the tactics I had been using for myself for awhile became more solidified after reading the book.  I had been trying to figure out when to say yes to activities and when to say no. I had come up with a priority list of how I should spend my time. But then, throw wedding planning and the onset of bathing suit season and my plan went out the window.

But then, the strategies in the book helped me get back on track.  And understanding that I need to set time aside for things that are important to me (including wedding planning) to help make sure I do them also relieves any guilt I have when I’m not doing them when I think I should be.  If I’ve made the time, I’ll get it done then.  It totally helps me focus more on the now and not on the then.

I’ve crafted prioritization categories and subcategories that take some of the weight off of knowing when to say yes to something and when to say no.

Category A: My health

Subcategory 1 – Working out with friends

Subcategory 2 – Working out with my Wah Lum family

Subcategory 3 – Working out by myself

Explanation.  My health is my number one priority.  If I don’t have that, then getting ahead in my career and living a long healthy life with my Partner In Crime won’t matter much.  My goal is to go to Tai Chi and Kung Fu once a week, but, if invited to a group yoga class or kickboxing circuit training with my closest pals, that activity wins.  And then another goal is to work out at least three times a week in the morning and once on the weekends with my Bestie.

Category B: My relationships

Subcategory 1 – My PIC (er, now fiance – still getting used to that)

Subcategory 2 – My bestie and closest pals

Subcategory 3 – My Fems

Subcategory 4 – My local web/future village

Subcategory 5 – Orlando handshakes (ie. classical networking)

Explanation. For the other two days of the week I try to spend the evenings with one of the subcategories.  If I can combine subcategories, awesome, if I can combine a subcategory with the category of Working Out, even better.

Category B: The Hodgepodge of the Weekend

Subcategory 1 – THE WEDDING PLANNING

Subcategory 2  – The blog writing (which I have been slacking on the past couple of months)

Subcategory 3 – FUN (Disney passholder things, water-based activities, festivals/shows – but, PIC and I have learned that FUN should only take up one day only on a weekend or our next week falls apart because we have no food and clean clothes… those have been crazy weeks)

Subcategory 4 – Upkeeping the house (I can only let PIC clean it so much before the guilt does creep in and I help dust or organize the fridge or something)

Explanation. With less than 100 days left until the BIG DAY, this is why wedding planning has bubbled to the top.  And sometimes we don’t follow our own FUN rule and blog writing goes to the way side.  But, hopefully, with some of the tactics I’ve learned through the book, we can live a much more happy life and get everything done.  Wouldn’t that be something?!?