Does our Pursuit of Happiness hinder Getting Things Done?
Taking a bit of a flyer on this one. Not particularly thought through, but it struck me in preparation for the next Ideas and Learnings project entitled The Science of Happiness.
In a line from Daniel Nettle’s great book ‘Happiness, The Science behind your Smile’ (don’t you just love publishers and their naming hooks (even though it does work)…. I wonder if Mr Nettle called it this in his first draft?) he states ‘…happiness, though, is not calculated by a simple summing up of all the positive moments and a subtraction of the negative ones. It also involves more complex cognitive processes, such as comparison with alternative possible outcomes (note: this quote refers to something he calls ‘level two happiness’ (with his apologies for the “barbaric terminology”) which is all about ‘judgements about the balance of feelings’. A hybrid of emotion and judgement about emotion.
Now it’s a very pop. psychology way of thinking about it, but could this element of our happiness ‘assessment’ also operate as a pre-assessment in advance of activities?
