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I know how I can be happy. Do you know? And if so, do you live it?

There are practices that will lead to a happy life and – also important – to a good relation with one’s work. But the problem is – perhaps the most profound one – that we just forget about all these best practices most of the time. So with this post, I’d like to share my personal manifest that should guide my daily life:

Daily Work

Prioritize first!

One of the hardest mental tasks is to prioritize work, so this should be done at first in the morning. For me, prioritization is just finding out what annoys me most:

Do tasks that annoy you first.

Finding out what annoys me is not easy, but one of the most important tasks in my life to keep me sane. I try to ask that question every morning and try to fix the problems in the same day.

If there are annoying tasks that can’t be “fixed” in one day, I think about canceling it. Learn to say “no”. If it is a project and I assume it will be annoying tomorrow (because it was yesterday and the weeks before), it’s even more important to get rid of it.

Happiness depends on being relaxed and pleased after each day, otherwise our lives go into the wrong direction. There is no such thing like “but later”. Life is now, and we all know it, but social and environmental pressure keeps us thinking otherwise. Brains fear change, but change is almost always a good thing.

That leads to a simple rule: Never accept annoying tasks that take longer than a day!

Don’t trick yourself into getting a rose colored perspective.

I always try measure my identification with the final result of a project. In software development we have a lots of interesting technologies that can keep us interested and motivated even when we are building devices that may destroy the world.

For me, I have set up these simple rules:

• 1. Build products you would use by yourself.
• 2. Build products that help people.
• 3. Build products that everyone can use.

For some projects, I may relax the third rule a little, but the first one is hammered in stone until further notice.

Don’t do side-projects!

That’s hard, but – for me – I think doing side projects is kind of counter productive. It interrupts my thinking about the current project and mostly leads to nothing but a creation of unfished, overly optimized and complex patchwork. Ok, a lot of good things came out of side-projects, but there is an alternative:

If a side-project is important to you, make it a project!

One rational goal is to finish side-projects. I personally started so many of them: For example I built my first (yet unfinished) concept mapper about two years ago. In the meantime, I changed the technologies several times and started the project over and over again (at least 5 times), and none of them ever reached a state that is presentable, even though some of them were actually usable, i.e. you could create and connect nodes with nice looking connectors.

A full featured project has a different signature to your life: It expresses commitment, has schedules, a goal and will be finished. A side-project is comparable to research and – effectively – may just be the manifestation of the urge to learn something new. A side-project is a subset of a real project and should be treated as such, this leads to:

If you do a side-project, it must be scheduled as part of the research for a current project.

I don’t know if this will work out, but it just sounds right :)  I keep observing the phenomenon in companies I consult for. A side-project that is scheduled as a sub-project has clearly defined requirements. Though it has the option to fail, the framing project keeps the side-project determined and so avoids perfectionism and blurry goals.

For me, I do consider to schedule additional projects day-wise, so for example to work on the main project 3 days a week and for a second project the remaining two days. I’m not yet sure if this works out well.

Weekends

Keep weekends different.

Though I have the urge to keep on working on weekends, I am starting to feel burned out after a few weeks. Obviously, I should take the weekends completely off, but at least – keep them different – from workdays.

The first tasks of my weekend is to do cleaning. That is just an optimization, I initially tried to do one small cleaning task every morning, but it just interrupted my weekday-flow in the sense that work just had a higher priority and cleaning felt interrupting. Since a few months, doing it all at once on Saturdays feels right: First I go through all the rooms and make a mental list of cleaning tasks, after that I do the actual cleaning and always wash one machine of clothes. For me, washing once a week is enough to get ahead of all the dirty stuff.

The second task is pending paper work. Doing taxes and stuff right after the cleaning work feels just right, it’s the other “annoying” task that keeps me from enjoying the weekend.

And the rest is free, completely free, and work-related tasks are forbidden, there may be weekends where I work at side-projects that never finish, but just after a thoughtful consideration and only if there is a lot motivation (I mean only these stuff you can’t stop you thinking about).

[Admittedly, the previous paragraph is just wishful thinking, but I think I really need to follow it]

General Rules

Write or talk about everything!

This turns out to be pretty healthy for your creativity. Even if no one is listening, when ideas and thoughts find a way out of your brain, there will be a lot more room for new ones. And yes, this blog is part of my brain-dump, because I don’t want to bother my friends about all the **** I am thinking about :)

Control mental and external interruptions.

Your brain has a limited capacity to suppress mental interruptions, and controlling external interruptions is surely a hard problem for all of us, but there can be done a lot! I strongly recommend reading David Rock’s book “Your Brain At Work”.

Keep a regular sleep cycle.

This is obvious but nevertheless often ignored, especially for freelancers working from their home-offices. I often have phases where I work until the morning hours, but in the end, I almost always regret it. My body does not feel right, and my mental capacities fluctuate day by day. When falling back into the a more regular work schedule, I feel like I am waking up. The work I have done in that times just does not look as cool anymore and the tunnel reality I experienced feels like wasted time.

Relief stress by taking a day off.

If you can not fully “let go” at the end of the day, you may just building up mental stress. A day off could be your life-saver, literally:

• One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. – Bertrand Russell

If you need to work at the weekend, take the Monday off.

My business partner has a consultancy job and we often meet at weekends to discuss and improve our products. These meetings are really detailed and important and so cost a lot of mental energy. I consider these days a full workday and try to take the Monday off.

Fin

This time I hoped this blog post would be a little shorter than the others, well I failed.

I hope you find some of the rules and ideas interesting. I personally try to follow them and will post updates here.