Let’s say you are one of the many people who feel they are not happy enough and want to get happier. You know that you can achieve this goal by spending 10 minutes a day working on it. However, you never end up getting down to it. Here are some reasons why that happens and methods for ensuring you do put in those 10 minutes.
One reason for your not spending time every day is that your goal for becoming happier is not high up enough on your priority list. All your time is preempted by other goals, like completing a task that relates to your job or family or by recreational activities like sailing your boat or reading a book. Once you get absorbed in these things, time flies: before you know it the day has gone by and there isn’t even 10 minutes left for introspection.
The method around this is to give more priority to your pursuit of happiness. The way to achieve this is for you to be watching for the next time you are stressed or unhappy, and to remind yourself when you are in that state that if you just spent a few minutes everyday developing the right attitude, the stress or unhappiness that you are experiencing will stop occurring. Also remind yourself that many people have successfully transformed themselves from stressed or unhappy individuals to satisfied, happy persons as a result of spending those few daily minutes.
Of course, if you don’t have stressful or unhappy moments and are only mildly interested in probing the nature of happiness, then there really is no need for you to pursue this quest at all, and you should move on to other things.
A second reason for not getting your ‘happiness work’ done is that you do not schedule your day properly or at all. I can tell you from experience that scheduling your day will result in your getting many things done as well as leave you feeling very satisfied when the day is over.
Unfortunately, how many of us work is as follows:
- We vaguely think of the various things we have to do during the day
- We start doing the one whichever seems most appealing
- We keep working on it obsessively until something pulls us away from the task to a new task (that something could be a person of authority or a strong mental suggestion)
- We start working on the new task and continue until we are pulled away from it by some other person or thought
- Our day is thus semi-random and our behavior resembles that of a leaf being blown about by the breeze, with our actions based purely on unplanned causes. At the end of the day we find that a whole lot of things remain undone, and we are dissatisfied with our own performance
- Rinse and repeat every day.
Scheduling your day averts this situation. What I mean by ‘scheduling your day’ is the following: 
- Draw up a list of what you want to do during the day including how much time you want to spend on each one of those activities
- Do not decide on the exact time of day at which to perform a certain activity unless that activity is inherently dependent on that particular time of day
- Decide if there are any tasks that simply must be started and finished on the day in question. Estimate how long those tasks will take and put them on your list with the associated durations. If they have to be done at a particular time of day, then put that down also
- Divide the rest of the day into time slots ranging from 20 minutes to 60 minutes
- Associate an activity with each time slot
- During that time slot, perform the associated activity nonstop; when you reach the end of the time slot, stop the activity and move onto the next one (this requires some discipline). Since these are activities which did not have to be finished on the concerned day, you can continue them on the subsequent day or days
- Print or write down your list on a piece of paper and carry it with you throughout the day. As soon as you finish an activity, whip the paper out, choose another activity and start it
- MAKE SURE THAT YOU SCHEDULE 10 MINUTES ON EACH DAY’S LIST FOR WORKING ON YOUR HAPPINESS!!
Choose whichever of the above methods are applicable to you and put them into practice ASAP. You will definitely see progress, and after a time, remarkable results. This is dynamite stuff… light the fuse now!
To your peaceful, prioritized days —
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Lucky great blog!
I like your approach to finding happiness, it’s unfortunate that for people to do something they have to have enough of a reason to do it – even when it could make a huge impact on their life!
great work,
Jeff Bode
Thanks, Jeff. Most people are so caught up in the whirlwind of sense entertainment that they are not even aware of core issues. This is elucidated by what Osho says:
“The teaching of the buddhas is: Find time and a place to remain unoccupied. That’s what meditation is all about. Find at least one hour every day to sit silently doing nothing, utterly unoccupied, just watching whatsoever passes by inside. In the beginning you will be very sad, looking at things inside you; you will feel only darkness and nothing else, and ugly things and all kinds of black holes appearing. You will feel agony, no ecstasy at all. But if you persist, persevere, the day comes when all these agonies disappear, and behind the agonies is the ecstasy.”