This Business Week article caught my eye and provides some interesting insights into happiness that I think ring true.  Of course, everyone wants to be happy but very few deliberately pursue this goal.  What’s more, it seems that as most of us drift through life pursuing activities that don’t do anything to contribute towards our happiness and often they have the opposite effect.

Insight #1:  You are responsible for your own happiness

Our findings were in many cases unexpected but clear-cut. There is an incredibly high correlation between people’s happiness (short-term satisfaction) and meaning (long-term benefit) at work and at home. In other words, those who experience happiness and meaning at work tend also to experience them outside of work. Those who are miserable on the job are usually miserable at home.

The implication is unmistakable. Since work and home are very different environments, our experience of happiness and meaning in life appears to have more to do with who we are than where we are. Rather than blaming our jobs, our managers, and our customers—or our friends, family members, and communities—for our negative worklife experience, we might be better served by looking in the mirror.

Insight #2:  Don’t be a victim

Having a victim mentality (i.e. everything happens TO you and you have no control) is not only bad from a happiness perspective but it’s also extremely counter productive.  Period.

One commonly expressed excuse for not getting more happiness and meaning out of life is: “I’m working too many hours.” But our results show that the number of hours worked had no significant correlation with happiness or meaning experienced at work or at home. So much for that excuse.

Insight #3:  Balance

Overall satisfaction at work increased only if both the amount of happiness and meaning experienced by employees simultaneously increased. This indicates that professionals don’t gain satisfaction at work either by being “martyrs” or by “just having fun”.

Insight #4  Make sure you are always challenged

To me, it’s one of life’s great paradoxes that we are wired to reach for things we don’t have but once we obtain them we no longer care!   It’s really all about the journey and we are happiest when we are on it and not when we arrive.

Feeling challenged is linked to greater satisfaction, so challenge yourself.

I’m always interested in evolving my own productivity and this article struck a chord with me just because it’s how I’ve been thinking of late.  The suggestion that multitaskers typically don’t do a great job with each task is not a surprise but single tasking is too slow and isn’t the answer either.  The conclusion that being selective about a few high value tasks to pursue at any one time seems very valid to me and having done it for a while now I think it’s a very effective way of getting the most important things done.

I also like this post on productivity that suggests not only having goals but also having a very clear plan to attain them.  Turning the volume down on lesser tasks and learning to ignore them is also a great technique and one that I am still working on!

Without question the best news story of the year by far!  Don’t care if it was a stunt, the way this story unfolded with first the boy floating off, then the details of the rudimentary craft emerged, then they found it and he wasn’t in it and finally he was hiding in the attic all along!  Priceless!!!

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/21306839/detail.html

“In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,” says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn’t as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Is it all really this complicated?  If you have the will power to exercise then why can’t you have it to control what you eat if you want to lose weight?  I’m yet to be convinced that weight loss comes down to anything other than burning more calories than you consume!

Full article

The recent prediction from the editor of the Financial Times that most news web sites will charge for content within a year heralds a shaky start!   Seems fairly obvious that this will fail as unless everyone does it then consumers will be driven to the sites that remain free.  For people to be willing to pay then added value must be there and surely the news is the news so that’s not going to happen!

Shane Richmond (Head of Technology for The Telegraph) is on the right track though and at least seems to understand the issues.  Glad to see some direction being offered by the techies!  The New York Times and The Guardian are also demonstrating they have ideas for tackling the future in the form of making their content accessible via API’s.

Inspiration for this post via Herd – Online publishers want to charge.

New York city portrait, HD time lapse, April 2006, music by Moby