Happiness — a simple yet illusive word that has been a topic of confusion and contemplation throughout my learning journey. Given that almost all of my work — blog posts or projects — indirectly (or directly?) try to pursue happiness, I wanted to deep-dive and understand it. In this post, I will attempt to articulate understanding happiness and managing it. The lessons here are inspired by The Happiness Advantage, Elephant in the Brain, Stumbling on Happiness, and personal experiences. Defining Happiness …
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Recently, I summarized ‘The Happiness Advantage’. Reading that book lead to raising some questions that I wanted to seek answers for. The question of “Why are we so bad at managing and understanding happiness?” lead me to this book – Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. In this summary, I attempt to better identify and understand the shortcomings of our brian (and ourselves) that result in us being bad at understanding managing happiness. Lesson 1 – Our minds are capable …
To better understand happiness, I picked up The Happiness Advantage — a book by Shawn Achor. To take that understanding of happiness one step further and put it into practice, I have identified the following action items or habits. The action items are for each of the seven “positive psychology principles” shared in the book. I hope to put these habits into practice via journaling or personal experiments. Principle 1 – The Happiness Advantage Success orbits around happiness, not the …
Pomodoro technique has been amongst one of my most impactful experiments to improve productivity. Today, I will be summarizing a book, Pomodoro Technique Illustrated by Staffan Nöteberg, that I read as I attempt to master the skill of Pomodoro via personal experiments. Introduction to Pomodoro The Pomodoro technique was defined by Francesco Cirillo in 1992 after the frustration of low productivity and unstructured studying. Therefore, his goal become to use Pomodoro (time) to focus and get the work done. In …
Have you felt like you a task — simple or complex — drags on for way too long? Or do you get distracted in midst of the task? I have experienced those problems in getting work done. Thus, for the month of January & February 2019, I wanted to conduct a personal experiment to improve focus by using constraint of timers (aka pomodoro technique). As part of this experiment, I also read a book on Pomodoro and summarized it here …