My resolution for June was to “Eat a peach”—embrace adventure, push myself to my limits, aim higher, indulge my interests.

And a focus for “Eat a peach” is this blog. I’m technologically very backward, and when I try to monkey around in the internet world, I’m often overwhelmed with the nasty feelings of stupidity and helplessness. Nevertheless, I vowed to persist in improving my site. Recently I’ve had three successes.

The first success was managing to change my URL to www.happiness-project.com from www.happinessproject.typepad.com. That original URL was just too long, and I didn’t like having the word “typepad” there. It took me five separate “help-tickets” from Typepad support to coach me through the process, but I stuck with it.

Second, a reader emailed me to suggest that in the Wednesday Tips section of the left column, instead of listing the dates and subjects of the lists, I should make the list into links. That way readers could instantly zap their way to a particular list, instead of having to hunt it down through the archive.

I read his email with a sigh. Of course, he was right. But how to do it? It only required one day and one help-ticket to get that done.

And today, after two help-tickets, I’m inserting my first image. Like so many of these tasks, it wasn’t hard—once I knew what to do.
Anyone who knows anything is chuckling in amusement at the fact that I’m congratulating myself for such very simple tasks—but for me, they count as successes. Each time I look at the blog, I get a little jolt of satisfaction.

Making tangible progress toward a concrete goal is a great contributor to happiness, so it’s important to incorporate that into your day, whether as part of work (as in my blog upgrades), or as part of a hobby (gardening, collecting, crafts).

Your goal needs to be clearly defined, to give you the satisfaction of recognizing your progress. In fact, studies show that those who frame their goals in concrete terms are 50% more likely to feel confident that they’ll hit those goals, and 32% more likely to feel in control of their lives.

Seeing things take shape under your hand, making things better, is enormously gratifying. Even if you deem the final goal to be fairly insignificant—cleaning a closet, organizing fishing tackle, building a bird house—the boost to happiness can be quite significant.

My next goal? Figure out Technorati.

weblog; goals, plans, hopes; happiness

Usually Wednesday is Tip Day, but surprise, today is a quiz instead.

Most people understand that it’s a pain to be disorganized. Disorganized people spend a lot of time hunting for their keys; they have to order a replacement birth certificate; they know they must have a dozen hammers, because it’s always been easier to buy a new one than to locate one in the house.

Often, however, people don’t realize how disorganized they are. Are you? Take this quiz.

At a minimum, you should know exactly where to find these possessions (assuming, of course, you own them—and you should):

 stamps
 your passport and if you’re married, your spouse’s passport
 a corkscrew
 Bandaids
 a safety pin
 a flashlight
 a functioning alarm clock
 paperclips or a stapler
 your phone charger
 a spare set of keys
 your doctor’s phone number
 cinnamon
 your tax statements from 2003
 fabric stain remover
 a pair of mittens
 spare AA batteries

Congratulate yourself for being well-organized if you can also say exactly where you’d find these objects:

 a tape measure
 your high-school yearbook
 a Swiss army knife
 a pencil sharpener
 a copy of Pride and Prejudice or The Da Vinci Code
 the instruction manual for your camera
 silver polish
 a vase the proper size to hold a bunch of tulips
 food coloring
 a tube of lip balm
 a cheese knife
 an extension cord
 a recipe for a favorite food your mother or father used to make
 a pack of playing cards
 a pad of sticky notes (Post-Its)

One observation: disorganized people often aim to put things away approximately. They’ll keep something “in a kitchen drawer” or “in my office.” It’s much more satisfying to put things away in an exact location—like a particular kitchen drawer. It takes some effort, at first, to decide where everything belongs, but once you’ve put objects in their proper places, it’s much easier to return them there.

organization, daily life, clutter

For years, I’ve been conscientiously maintaining our photo albums. I use them as a kind of family diary, to capture little family jokes or funny incidences as well as the usual round of birthday party, Christmas morning, and vacation scenes.

I performed this task with a fair amount of grumbling—no one cared, no one helped, no one appreciated what a big job it was, no one ever cooperated when I wanted to take pictures, the Big Man wouldn’t even help write captions, blah, blah.

As part of the Happiness Project, however, I’ve admonished myself to do such tasks (sending out our annual Valentine’s cards, buying baby gifts for friends, paying bills) without expecting appreciation. I should do them for myself. This sounds like a selfish approach, but in fact, it’s less selfish, because it means I don’t wait for praise or recognition.

Nevertheless, the whole elaborate photo album process had begun to seem a bit futile, as the fat albums sat neglected on the shelves.

But at last all that hard work is paying off. For the last several days, the Big Girl and even the Little Girl have been poring over the albums, going through each one several times (the Little Girl has been wreaking some damage, but nothing that can’t be fixed). The Big Girl loves to see pictures of herself as young as the Little Girl, and to see herself wearing the adorable outfits that the Little Girl is wearing now. The Little Girl shrieks with excitement each time she spots a familiar face.

Advice often given to a parent—and it’s just as useful for a spouse—is to be a storehouse for happy memories for the family.

Research has shown that depressed people have as many nice experiences as other people, but they don’t remember them as well. And even for people who aren’t depressed, thinking back on happy times elevates mood.

Observing and preserving memories is one of the most satisfying ways of bringing order to life. Both the process of preparing the albums (though I did complain) and looking back at them were deeply gratifying.

Looking back at photographs is always fun; it’s fascinating to see the appearances of children (and myself! the Big Man always looks the same) change over time.

Also, it scares me to realize just how little of my own past I remember.

Looking at the photographs helps keep my memories more active, as I recall the little details that seemed unforgettable, but fade so quickly: how the Big Man used to make rice pudding all the time, and how he used to swim for exercise; how tiny the Big Girl was when she was born (four pounds, four ounces) and how she used to love to see people pretend to cry; and how the Little Girl loves to show off her belly button, and how she looked before any of her teeth grew in.

How wistful I was when I no longer had my sweet toothless baby! It makes me happy that, at least, I still have the photos.

I just finished Daniel Gilbert’s new book, Stumbling on Happiness. It’s thought-provoking, but in case you don’t have time to read it yourself, here’s my fourth-grade-book-report-style summary of “The parts I found most interesting.”

Gilbert’s main argument is that we aren’t very good at predicting what will make us happy in the future. This matters, because if we want to take steps in the present that will contribute to our future happiness, we need to be able to anticipate what, in fact, will make us happy—consider the person who splurges on a $300 professional tattoo today, only to pay a painful $6,000 in ten years to remove it. The job you have, the body you have, the city you live in—all reflect decisions you made in the past about what you’d care about in the future.

Gilbert suggests a remedy: To predict what’s likely to make you happy in the future, ask someone who is having that experience at the moment. So ask people who are associates at law firms whether they like their jobs; ask people who just visited Prague with their kids whether they had fun (the more similar such surrogates are to you, the more helpful their information is likely to be).

Gilbert maintains that although we all feel very idiosyncratic, we’re much more alike in our preferences than we imagine—so the experience of other people is the best guide to follow.

I recently applied this principle myself, without realizing it. When considering starting a blog, instead of reading among the dozens of Internet articles about the joys, trials, and lessons about running a blog, I asked three bloggers I knew whether they enjoyed doing it, and how they did it.

One friend is a prominent columnist for Vanity Fair who keeps his blog as an extension of his writing. James Wolcott. One is a novelist who keeps her blog for a lark, to indulge her love for food, restaurants, and cooking. Lunch for Two. One is a law professor who runs a blog to generate discussion on legal topics that interest him. Volokh Conspiracy.

These three gave me uncannily accurate and useful advice. Although at the time, I felt like a loser for doing nothing more than talking to people I randomly happened to know, this approach was probably far more helpful than doing proper “research.”

On a slightly different topic, I was intrigued to learn from Stumbling on Happiness that often, our behavior is designed to ward off the nasty feeling of regret (the feeling of self-blame for an unfortunate outcome that we might have prevented if we’d acted differently). Apparently people regret not taking an action more than they regret taking an action. Gilbert speculates that that’s because it’s easier to console ourselves with the lessons learned by some action gone awry than to see the good that came from the failure to act.

This is a very helpful observation about actions ; I think, however, that it’s absolutely not true of speech. I very often regret a remark that I made. In fact, I’m trying to train myself that if it even crosses my mind that I should refrain from saying something, I should think no further, but just shut up.

Idle criticism, sharp remarks, needling jokes, minor gossip…I don’t need to consult with anyone else to predict that, in the future, I won’t regret having kept silent.

“The capacity to endure a more or less monotonous life is one which should be acquired in childhood. Modern parents are greatly to blame in this respect; they provide their children with far too many passive amusements, such as shows and good things to eat, and they do not realize the importance to a child of having one day like another, except, of course, for somewhat rare occasions. The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts himself from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness…certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony. Take, say, Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude.’” –Bertrand Russell