The Happy Grid is a technique I devised a few months ago to help me use short and long-term happiness as a guide for daily decision making. Since I’ve been using it, it has had a hugely positive impact on me: I am better at prioritising work that makes me more fulfilled, and hopefully the people I collaborate with get more out of working with me.
In this post I’ll explain how to set up your own Happy Grid. I’ll also go through the four different task types that make up the grid, and what these can tell you about the pressures that influence how you use your time. It’s a long post, but stick with it as I think there’s a lot of useful stuff here.
Background
The story begins at the end of a busy week. I had ticked off all the most important actions on all my major projects. I should have been feeling happy, but I felt quite depressed and that depression extended into the weekend. It was confusing because this was supposed to feel good – to have not sucumbed to distraction and to have done the things on which other people were depending on me. Yet I didn’t feel any payback for getting to the end of the list.
A few weeks before I had been on holiday. One of the things that I do when I have some time away is write two lists in my journal: the first, a list of goals for the year ahead; the second a list of things I feel happy doing – a list of things that bring happiness in the moment.
I decided to map my ‘done’ list against my lists of goals and things I enjoy doing. The result was very revealing.
The Happy Grid Diagnostic Test
To help you get the most out of reading this post, I suggest you do the following quick diagnostic test right now. Do it quickly on a piece of paper. You can always go back and do it more thoroughly. I am going to ask you to write down four lists.
Current goals
First, write down a list of your current goals. Think of goals on a say a 3- to 6-month horizon. Include in your list the sort of state you want to find yourself in. So for instance one of my goals was to spend more time doing face-to-face teaching. Another is to spend time with people who positively influence my thinking. Neither of these goals are to do with attaining some kind of status. Think broadly. Do you want to spend more time inside or out? Are there things you want to learn?
Anti-goals
The second list of of things you don’t want to achieve. Think of these as anti goals. For instance I don’t want to spend more time in front of a computer screen. I don’t really want to get involved with teaching projects where I don’t have influence over the content. I don’t really want to get involved in building a new knowledge management system for the business, even though this is something I’ve done before. Knowing what you don’t want to do is as important as what you do, but is sometimes harder to elucidate.
Enjoy doing
The third list to write down is a list of things you enjoy doing.. Think of things that make you go into a state of ‘flow’ when you do them, when time just flies by because you are enjoying yourself, but equally which keep you challenged. Think of things that you get a buzz out of because you enjoy doing them. My list includes things like teaching and coaching, writing new teaching material. But it also includes travelling by train, cycling, spending time with family and friends, spending time outside.
Drag list
The fourth list to write down is things that you don’t enjoy. These are things that feel like a drag. For me that list includes small-scale management of projects. This is something that I don’t enjoy and recognise that there are other people who do this much better than me. It also includes the opposites to the things I enjoy doing – so I don’t enjoy being inside all the time, I don’t enjoy being alone for too long.
You are now ready to create your own Happy Grid.
The four types of tasks
I reasoned that the tasks on my to-do list fitted into one of four categories, which I labelled and described as follows:
- Type-1 tasks – Tasks that are goal-aligned and enjoyable. These are things we should prioritise because they feel good to do, and because they are contributing to a goal.
- Type-2 tasks – Tasks that are not goal aligned, but nevertheless enjoyable. It feels good to do them but it doesn’t help us reach one of our goals.
- Type-3 tasks – Tasks that are goal-aligned but unenjoyable. We generally need to do them for long-term happiness but doing so doesn’t feel good.
- Type-4 tasks – Tasks that are neither goal-aligned nor enjoyable. Doing these doesn’t feel good in the short- nor the long-term.
Creating your Happy Grid
Create a 2×2 grid and label the four quadrants as follows.
Type 1 Type 2
Type 3 Type 4
Now, go through each entry in your current to-do list, and write it down in the quadrant of the grid to which it corresponds.
When I categorised and wrote down my list of completed tasks for the previous week, I found that the majority of what I had got done were Type 4 tasks: tasks that are neither enjoyable nor contribute towards longer-term aims, with a smattering of Type 3s and Type 2s. Revealingly I didn’t have anything written down in the Type 1 quadrant, the one that feel good to do and contribute towards some positive goal.
I felt I had landed upon a key prioritisation tool for the week ahead.
Understanding the four tasks categories
Clearly we don’t have the luxury of only doing Type-1 things. But categorising things in this way can at least help us be more aware of the nature of the list of tasks before us, and can help us make more fulfilling choices about what we do. And beyond being simply aware, we can actively make decisions to help us spend more time doing things that we enjoy.
Let’s explore each of these categories in turn.
Type-1 tasks – goal-aligned, enjoyable tasks
In an ideal world, we’d spend the majority of our time doing these sorts of tasks. Half the trouble is simply knowing what these goal-aligned, enjoyable tasks are. The aim of the happy grid is to help us identify the sorts of things we enjoy doing and that are goal-aligned, and to make sure we are spending at least some of everyday doing things that are likely to make us happy.
By regularly repeating the diagnostic exercise described at the start of this post, you can start to recognise Type-1 tasks. Identifying and writing down type-1 tasks is the first step to making sure you spend more time doing what makes you happy. The second step is managing and steadily reducing the time you spend doing Type-2, Type-3 and Type-4 tasks.
Type-2 tasks – non-goal-aligned, enjoyable tasks
Type-2 tasks are enjoyable in the moment but don’t necessarily contribute to what you want to achieve long-term. The worst Type-2s are tasks that you enjoy doing but that lead you towards anti-goals, the things you really don’t want to be achieving.
Browsing the web, flicking through social media and sharpening your pot of colouring pencils generally fall into this category. Another word for this type of Type-2 task is procrastination. For procrastination Type-2s, you would be better off doing something from your Type-1 list. If you set up your Type-1 list appropriately, you will always have something more enjoyable to do. But also falling into this category without being procrastination are Type-2 tasks that you might enjoy doing in their own right, but that doing too often will steer you off course from the goals you do want to be aiming towards.
To give a personal example, I enjoy developing concepts for online learning tools, but it would be a non-goal to build a career in which I end up having to spend more time in front of a computer. On the contrary, my goal is to spend more time doing more face-to-face teaching and to minimise screen time, and so spending time developing proposals for online learning tools, while enjoyable in the moment, is not necessarily getting me any closer to where I want to be.
This is a very common scenario in the workplace. The organisations that we work for tend to reward us for doing things that help the organisation meet its aims. Less enlightened organisations do it by fiduciary means; more enlightened organisations might try to align individual goals with organisational goals, but in practice this is hard, and in reality tasks get allocated on the basis of best person for the job, rather than best job for the person.
As Peter Drucker points out in his book, ‘How to manage oneself’, it is up to us as individuals to tell managers what work we do well and how we do it best, and not up to our managers to guess.
By definition, Type-2 tasks are enjoyable, and so on any particular day, doing lots of Type-2 tasks isn’t a problem. But over time, time spent on Type-2s is at the expense of time on Type-1 tasks. So how should we reduce the Type 2s?
Minimising the Type-2 tasks
For the procrastination Type-2s there are lots of options for reducing distraction, which I will cover in another post. As for the more structured work-based Type-2 tasks you can:
• Avoid taking them on in the first place. Before you take on a new task, look at where it will go on your Happy Grid. If it’s a type 2, consider politely turning it down.
• Try delegating – after all, just because a task doesn’t align to one of your goals, it might align to someone else’s.
• Try to find a way to recast the task so that it does align to one of your goals.
Type-3 tasks – goal-aligned, unenjoyable tasks
If you don’t get Type-3 tasks done then you won’t meet your goals. But the chances are you are unlikely to do Type-3 tasks because, by definition, you don’t enjoy doing them.
Here you have two options: either delegate the task, or set up a regular routine that ensures you get them done reliably and in as short a time as possible in order to liberate your time for Type-1 tasks. A personal example of such a routine is that time I set aside each week to deal with expenses. I don’t enjoy it, I need to do it, and I do it the same time on Wednesdays without fail. Then the rest of the week I don’t have to think about it.
It is important to be disciplined about carrying out the routine so that you be confident the rest of the time that these Type-3 tasks can wait until the next time you carry out your routine.
Type-4 tasks – non-goal-aligned, unenjoyable tasks
These are the tasks that we want to minimise. We don’t enjoy doing them and they aren’t getting us any closer to any of our goals. As I discovered, a week full of Type-4 tasks is an unhappy week.
As well as not making us feel good, Type-4 tasks come with an opportunity cost: they are preventing us doing any of the other 3 types of task, all of which would make us happier, not least of all, Type-1 tasks. We should make it our business to try and reduce as far as possible the Type-4 tasks on our list.
Minimising the Type-4 tasks
We can start the Type-4 purge using the techniques we used for Type-3s and Type-2, in decreasing order of preference:
- Avoid taking them on in the first place – once we know what counts as Type-4, we can spot it before we say yes.
- Try delegating – as above, there may be someone else for whom the task is more enjoyable or for whom the task is more goal-aligned.
- Set up a strict routine for getting this type of task done quickly. See the notes above for Type-3 tasks. If you take this approach, experiment with running the routine as infrequently as possible so you don’t let the time spent doing it creep up too much.
- Just don’t do the task and see what happens. It is very easy to think that a task is important when we are caught up in the moment, but given some distance and time, some tasks can just go away. Either someone else does them, or, because it isn’t done, alternative options open up. You may well end up being thought of as unreliable, but better that than being reliable at doing something you don’t want to.
If having worked through the above options, and you decide you can’t’ simply not do the task, then it is time to start asking some serious questions about the sort of activities that you do. But saying that is not so gloomy as this process gives you a constructive way to talk about what it is you do want to do.
Prioritisation using the Happy Grid
Setting up your first Happy Grid should be revealing in itself. But it is also meant to be a decision-making tool. Having distributed your tasks into the grid, what should you do first?
For grown-ups, I don’t think the get-your-homework-done-before-you-go-out-to-play approach counts any more because there are so many factors influencing us to get things done to meet other people’s aims. You need to start prioritising your own goals. So I would recommend starting the day with either a Type-1 or Type-3 task. Let the happiness that you derive from getting that thing done first then set the tone for the day ahead.
Reflective use of the Happy Grid
I am finding that the more times I use the grid, the better I am getting at understanding my own motivations and goals, and the more adept I am becoming at making sure I am not getting lumbered with things that I don’t enjoy doing.
I believe being more aware of these things is better for everyone. As Peter Drucker says, we are much more likely to perform well doing work that we enjoy and that we are motivated to do. More philosophically, Seneca said ‘Life is long if you know how to use it’. It is up to us to positively decide how to use our time in a way that will make us happy.
Mary
Can you post a visual example? Thank you!
mazda
Great idea, I’ll see if I can create something in the next couple of weeks.