Five Simple, Yet Effective Ways To Impact Your Happiness Today
Photo: @senivpetro / Freepik.com
Between career demands and personal obligations, you can easily feel like you’re running a race as soon as your alarm goes off in the morning. Whether you’re looking to achieve more simplicity or better self-care, there are simple ways to impact your overall happiness as you go throughout your day.
1. Set a MORE fluid routine
In whichever way your to-do list takes form, giving yourself more guidelines in your timelines could be more encouraging than you think. For some, planning your day down to the minute can add the unnecessary stress of strict, self-imposed deadlines. Instead, you can easily incorporate a Scrum management style into your daily routine.
Scrum is a type of agile management process where you manage your time into sprints. A sprint can typically be about one to two weeks. However, you can fit a sprint into your day to accomplish your tasks.
Your daily sprint:
Outline your tasks into a process of To-Do, In Progress, Issues, Done
Add your items into the appropriate areas, this can be done on paper, as notes in your smartphone, or even a project management tool like Trello.
As you complete the tasks, move them across the categories until they’re completed. If you encounter any problems in completing your to-do list, your sprint can handle that by adding the tasks to the Issues category where you can describe the issues as well as solutions.
2. Unsubscribe to aimless emails
Between social media, texting, and (the seemingly more rare) phone calls, it is so easy for friends, coworkers, and strangers to be constantly inserted into your life no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Adding email to the list, managing the constant influx of communication can be overwhelming and almost impossible to keep up with on a daily basis. Putting value back into your daily communication can impact your overall happiness through meaningful messages from people you know instead of digests of blowout sales from spammers.
I can get an upwards of 12 new emails each morning with the ‘dings’ starting at 4 a.m.
Putting functionality back into your email: How to unsubscribe
Most of us usually have that one email account where junk email goes to die. However, your primary email account can easily turn into your designated junk email account as a result of the many online marketing tactics designed to capture that information. Whether you’ve had to give out your email to download a .pdf or to sign-in to a new website, you can gain control over who contacts you and what you have to see during your day.
The key is unsubscribing, not simply deleting. If you receive handfuls of emails per day without one being from someone you know personally, it can take a good chunk of time to go back through to delete months of aimless emails.
You can gain control of your email through:
Unsubscribing to email lists that no longer fit your lifestyle today. Are you still getting email promotions from that store in the town you don’t live in anymore? Or alerts from the food blogger you’re not into anymore? Time to unsubscribe.
Removing yourself from email lists you don’t even remember signing up for. This may be obvious, but there can be times when we receive an email from a person or organization that looks similar to other emails we read, it can be easy to just pass it by. However, if you’re not familiar with the sender, you don’t have to let their messages into your Inbox. Kick them out with one click.
Deleting old emails. Once you’ve unsubscribed from unnecessary emails going forward, going back through and deleting the ones that already exist will give you more control over your overall unread email account. Do you have unread emails from 2017? Emails from people you never met? Time to delete.
3. Don’t get mad at yourself when you do nothing
Coming off of the Scrum talk, there might be times where you feel like you accomplished nothing. The frustration of “not being productive” can feel like punishment enough. However, between the demands of your career, family, and other personal obligations, it’s inevitable to have days where you can’t do as much as you may like.
While giving ourselves time to refresh and recharge isn’t a hallmark of our American self-identity, it’s important to remember we’re not machines. There’s no backup battery pack, power cord, or shop to switch out our parts when we crash. Burnout is still a constant factor in our lives especially as the workday extends due to advanced technology and work from home opportunities. If you find yourself hitting a wall, maybe it’s time to let yourself be. Just press pause on what can be done tomorrow and listen to what your body is telling you. #SelfCare
4. When you indulge with food, indulge mentally too
Whether it’s leftover birthday cake or donuts your coworker brought in, the opportunity to snack on sweets and junk food can be out of our control at times. When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing how many times we celebrate personal and professional goals with food. Even just sundry moments where food is used as an emotional outlet: leftover snacks from the previous meeting to get you through the afternoon slump, donuts on a Monday, half-priced apps at happy hour, the list goes on.
In these moments, enjoy. Be fully aware of the extra slice of cake you took or your order of potato skins for the table and just enjoy it for the moment. There’s no use in beating yourself up mentally in these celebratory occasions of indulgence. It’s an indulgence for a reason, so robbing yourself of this temporary joy through self-deprecating thoughts takes away the point of enjoying yourself at all.
Acknowledge, enjoy, and know you’ll go back to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.
5. When all else fails, think of others’ needs
Family, work, personal responsibilities. It’s simple to let all that you’ve worked for become your entire world. However, if you’re finding yourself in a slump thinking globally can give you an added perspective on your life and your community.
There are many ways to give back that can easily be incorporated into your busy schedule. You can schedule a pickup appointment with your local clothes closet or coordinate a volunteer day with your friends or family. Whichever works for you, taking yourself out of the equation can potentially impact your overall happiness through teamwork and giving back to something bigger than yourself.
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Happiness, and what it means to you, doesn’t have to be a far off goal that you can get to someday, maybe. Gaining control and adding value back into your life can be done in small moments throughout the day. Happy trails.
Note: This was originally published on Medium.com