Boosting Your Happiness at Work

“There are literally dozens of things you can do to fulfill basic needs and boost your happiness at work,  though we don’t have the time to entertain all of them. Here are a few that meet my stringent, juicy, low hanging fruit standard. What do I mean by this? Well, consider the framework on your screen. The upper sections of this diagram indicate the highest impact happiness activities. These activities will increase your personal happiness and team happiness at work by a large amount. The lower two sections consist of things that have lower impact. Let’s focus above the line on high impact items. I like to call these happiness activities juicy fruit. The other dimension along the left and right sides of the vertical line indicate how easy or difficult the item is to implement. How much time, effort, and resources are required to carry out the happiness activity?  Does doing them require a lot of time and cooperation of several coworkers or can they be implemented relatively quickly and painlessly? It obviously makes sense to aim for things that are easy rather than difficult. I want us to aim for low and juicy activities by focusing on the upper right quadrant. So overall, I want us to focus on the juicy low hanging fruit. These activities are high impact and easy to do other than juicy low hanging fruit. There’s another thing that I’d like to talk about that has to do with the motivation to achieve happiness. People think that high levels of motivation alone are enough. However, even very high levels of motivation are not enough on their own. It’s also important to have the right…”