In my introductory post, I mentioned how I reflect on life on a daily basis and try to ask the question of whether I am happy or not; a lmost every night I conclude I am indeed happy. I consider this to be a very good thing, and, of course, I believe it to be true.

However, when I am making the statement I am relying mostly on my memory and my personal cognitive bias; that is, it is possible that I am holding on and remembering more strongly positive memories than negative ones. It all makes sense, I am a positive person in general with a great desire to be happy and achieve a piece of mind, so my brain is giving me the reinforcement I need – thanks buddy :).

But how to know for sure? How can we track our happiness level, and even maybe improve it? I recently discover a very simple method which I put into action right away… Here it is.

Simple Method: Daily Log Tracker

All the credit for the practice I am going to describe goes to Jim Collins (author of many great books); he recently talked about it in a podcast interview with Tim Ferris, which I highly recommend.

While Jim Collins uses this method to track his daily creative hours, he also uses to track his emotional state, and that is where we can adjust the practice to our needs.

Here is the short of it:

We are going to create a spreadsheet with 4 columns: Date : The date we are reporting on Summary : Short description of event son the day. It does not have to be very detailed, but enough information to summarize your day. I usually add 3-6 short sentences. Productive/Creative Hours : how many productive and/or creative hours did you have in that day. Happiness Level : A number representing your happiness level for the day (5 level scale of happiness). Here is the scale recommended and the one I use: 2 –> Great day 1 –> Good day 0 –> Blah day -1 –> Bad day -2 –> Horrible day

At the end of each day, we are going to record the information for the day

It is very important to be disciplined and fill out your daily entry every night. It is important to do it at night so you have the day’s memories fresh on your mind. Especially for the happiness level, you want to accurately record how you are feeling in the moment. If you forget, try to do it early the next morning, but waiting any longer would change your memories for the day.

You can think of this as a daily log; it takes me literally 2-3 minutes to fill the daily information. Here is an example of my personal log:

So far, we are basically collecting data, and we need a fair amount of data for any this to be valuable, we can not rely on only a week or a month worth of records; I would said at least 3 months will start showing trends and correlations.

But once we have enough data, the fun begins, there are a few things that interest me right away, I hope you share my interest, here they are:

I want to average my happiness levels for the week, month, trimester, year, or any time period. I claim I am mostly happy, do the numbers support my claim? (so far they do)

Is there a correlation between happiness and productivity?

Is there a correlation between happiness levels and particular activities?

Search for the best and worst days and see if there are any trends as it relates to productivity and/or activities

Once you have enough data, you can also keep a dashboard with running averages/summaries that could quickly give you a snapshot view. For example, on your spreadsheet you could keep track of Happiness Level Average & Total Productive Hours, for the latest month, trimester, semester or year.



Of course you can run your number son whatever time period you are curious about; but it seems like a good idea to keep a dashboard view with the averages and summaries.

Admittedly, I do not have the dashboard up and running yet as I am still on the data-gathering phase; I might post an update to this post once I get it all setup.

Improving Happiness Levels

Now that you have the data, you want to analyze it to figure out what factors influence your happiness level. It will most likely be a combination of activities and productivity. You want to focus both on the good days and the bad days, and you want to find specific influencing factors.

The next step is simple really, you want to do more of the things that make you happy, and most importantly, eliminate the things that make you unhappy.

Review your dashboard continuously to see if the changes you are making are improving your happiness level.

Why did this resonated with me?

In my work, we practice Continous Improvement in almost every aspect of what we do. Continuous Improvement is a practice where we are constantly looking for incremental areas of improvements by continuously inspecting our practices and adjusting accordingly. I won’t be getting into all the details, but basically is an on-going effort to improve our process, quality, and/or service.

What this simple method allows me to do, is to apply the same principles of continuous improvement into the happiness levels. I can identify what is boosting my happiness and reinforce the behaviour or action; I can also look into identifying the root cause of what is making me unhappy and try to correct it.

The idea here is that with time, and continuous adjustment and my behavior, actions and habits, my happiness levels should be continuously improving 🙂

Tip: Simplify the data-collecting method

Making data collection as easy as possible is a great way to facilitate the daily log; I recommend creating a simple form on Google Forms, you will end up with a form as shown below.

Once you have your form ready, bookmark it so you have easy access to it, and that is it! You will have a one-click access to your form, fill in the 4 fields and submit.

If you are not familiar with Google Forms, here is a good tutorial, and there are many others on YouTube. But in a nutshell, what this form is doing is collecting the information submitted on a spreadsheet; so it is basically all you need.

Authors Referenced

Jim Collins (Good to Great, Build to Last, etc.)

Tim Ferris (The 4-Hour Workweek, Tribe of Mentor, etc)

Credits

Photo from Pexels