Adding Happiness To Your To-Do List

Make Time For Happiness - Series: Part 1

Do you lay in bed at night and stress over all the things you should have done? Do you feel unorganized sometimes (or all the time) and feel that you have not accomplished even half of the things you needed to do. Does your daily happiness level need a boost?

Recently I have decided to do something about the feelings I have that I am not achieving important daily goals. One technique that has been very effective for me, and might also help you, is making a daily to-do list.

There is nothing new about the basic concept of a to-do list. You get a piece of paper and start listing things that you need to do and when you are finished you look back over that list and usually sigh. This sigh causes most people to dread doing a to-do list or stop doing them altogether. It’s not the listing process itself, It’s the way you approach your list and what you are leaving off of your list that causes you to sigh.

Well sigh no more, making one quick change to your to-do lists can make the entire process exciting.

To-Do List version 1.0

The basic to-do list can help you organize and prioritize your life into manageable tasks that give you a better sense of direction and save you time during your day. If you don’t use to-do lists maybe it’s time to give it a try. Once you have started to use a to-do list you’ll notice that your day seems to have a new direction and seems much more manageable. Each item you mark off your list can create for you a little feeling of accomplishment that grows with each finished task. The feeling of accomplishment you get from a basic to-do list is great, but how can we turbo charge that feeling.

First let’s examine a standard to-do list.

Anatomy Of An Average Idea

I woke up today and started on my daily to-do list. I quickly brainstormed all the things I needed to do and when I thought I had finished I scanned it to make sure I had not left anything important off the list.

Here is what I had on my to-do list:

• Cook breakfast → BACON®, eggs, hash browns, and coffee.
• Write first post of the day.
• Check email → answer all email, complete any action required on each email.
• Clean house → yes I’m really going to clean the house.
• Daily reading → news sites, blogs, ebooks I have downloaded.
• Cook lunch and start dinner → lunch : Wild Bill’s home made vegetable soup, dinner : 15 bean soup
  Write second post of the day.
• Blog maintenance → backup blog database, check 50 past posts for html mistakes, check 50 past posts for broken links and update any broken links, check plugins for updates.
• Have dinner
• Spend time with family (until their bedtimes) → suggestions : goto park (weather permitting), watch movie, run errands (Walmart), talk about what we have scheduled for the upcoming week, etc…
• Spend time with wife
• Check email → answer all email, complete any action required on each email.
• Nightly productive time → write a third article for the website, work on articles I have started but not finished, work on multi part series, work on systems, work on PA handbook, etc…
• Bedtime

At second glance my list looked thorough, well defined, and complete, however I really felt that something very important was missing. I’ve learned to pay more attention to those nagging feelings I get that something is just not right. That nagging feeling has lead to some of my biggest breakthroughs on my pursuit of happiness. Now when I get these feelings I stop what I am doing and spend as much time as I need to discover what it is I am missing and what it is that this feeling is trying to make me aware of.

I went over the list again, stopping on each item trying to discover the missing item. Sometimes this can take a while but if you stick with it you will usually discover what is missing. I reread the list three times before I realized what was missing. I didn’t notice what was missing the first three times because it was sort of already on the list, I just had not given one of the most important to-do items enough attention.

The Missing Listing Link

What was missing? What was it that I had come close to including on my list but had just not defined as well as I should have? I had all of the necessary, productive, repetitive, mundane, and fairly important tasks covered. The answer I needed was right at the top of this website. I had forgotten to focus on my pursuit of happiness.

Do you forget to focus on your happiness?

Have you ever added happiness to your to-do list? I looked back over past lists of mine and noticed almost every one was focused on external tasks with almost no consideration of internal growth. Personal growth is what moves us forward and if you have forgotten to spend some of your precious time each day focusing on things that make you happy well you are not really growing. When we stop growing we stop living and start dying.

I’m really beginning to love my life, I want my happiness to grow and grow and spread to other people to help them grow and increase their happiness. The question I needed to answer is, “How can I increase my happiness and assign to it the priority level that it deserves?” It took one minute for me to answer that question, add happiness to my to-do list!

To-Do List version 2.0 - including the happiness plugin

Determining what makes you happy might be hard for you. I have started an article to help people find what truly makes them happy, but for now let’s start with the simple things that help you relax, put a smile on your face, and find ways to work them into our list.

Make yourself a quick list of things that you enjoy doing. Here are some of mine that you can use as an example:

• Taking a bath and reading.
• Swimming and laying out in the sun.
• Studying web design and improving my web design skills. I know I’m weirs but I enjoy a good challenge.
• Making my wife laugh and smile.
• Hanging out with friends and family

That is a short list and I could come up with hundreds more but this is a great starting point. Now let’s add some of these personal happiness ideas to our new to-do list.

**I have highlighted where I have added happiness in blue**

• Cook breakfast → more BACON® because bacon make me happy, eggs, hash browns, and coffee. Get my 3 year old son to help because he loves to help.
• Write first post of the day.
• Check email → answer all email, complete any action required on each email.
• Take a bath and read something that I have been wanting to read.
• Clean house → yes I’m really going to clean the house. Put on some music, Michael Bublé.
• Daily reading → news sites, blogs, ebooks I have downloaded. Find something that makes me smile.
• Cook lunch and start dinner → lunch : Wild Bill’s home made vegetable soup, dinner : 15 bean soup. Get my wife and son’s to help and have fun cooking.
• Write second post of the day.
• Blog maintenance → backup blog database, check 50 past posts for html mistakes, check 50 past posts for broken links and update any broken links, check plugins for updates.
• Have dinner
• Spend time with family (until their bedtimes) → suggestions : goto park (weather permitting), watch movie, run errands (Walmart), goto the book store, talk about what we have scheduled for the upcoming week, etc…
• Spend time with wife → this is already fun and greatly increases my happiness. (wink wink)
• Check email → answer all email, complete any action required on each email.
• Nightly productive time → Call a friend, write a third article for the website, work on articles I have started but not finished, work on multi part series, work on systems, work on PA handbook, etc…
• Bedtime → Kiss my wife goodnight!

Now that’s a to-do list that I can feel happy about. You can bet to-do lists will not be the mundane task for me that they used to be. Start today, make you a to-do list and inject happiness into it.

Make Time For Happiness - Series:

• Part 1 - Adding Happiness To Your To-Do List
• Part 2 - Taking Your Happiness To The Next Level - Decrease Interruptions
• Part 3 - Don’t Be Stingy! - Give Some Happiness To Increase Your Happiness
• Part 4 - How To Start Pursuing Your Happiness Today

What happy things are you going to add to your to-do list?