The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

came up with a novel way to ask for help: I pulled together a strategy group. I had recently met two writers, Michael and Marci. Each of us was working on a book, each of us was trying to be smart about our project and our overall career, each of us was an extroverted type working alone much of the time and eager for conversation. When I discovered that, coincidentally, Michael and Marci knew each other, I had an inspiration.
    In February, I’d identified a problem. I wished I had a writing partner, someone with whom I could discuss writing and career strategy. I’d let Jamie off the hook, mostly, but maybe Michael, Marci, and I could form a group that would help fill that need. Benjamin Franklin, along with twelve friends, formed a club for mutual improvement that met weekly for forty years. Maybe we could form a group, with a slightly narrower mission than “mutual improvement.”
    I tentatively floated the idea in an e-mail to Michael and Marci. To my surprised gratification, they both immediately embraced the idea. Michael suggested a structure for our meetings. “How about every six weeks, for two hours? Twenty minutes of catch-up conversation, then thirty minutes each to talk about our individual concerns, with a ten-minute break in the middle.” Marci and I embraced this highly defined structure, which was a good indication that the three of us were well matched.
    “And we should give ourselves a name,” Marci said, only half joking. “And what kind of group are we?”
    We decided to call ourselves MGM, after our initials, and we decidedthat we were a “writers’ strategy group.” We didn’t talk about actual writing very much, though sometimes one of us circulated a chapter or two; we spent most of our time talking about strategy. Should Michael hire a virtual assistant? Was Marci spending too much time touring for her book? Should Gretchen send out a happiness project newsletter? The group was an instant success. Sitting with two other energetic, encouraging, smart writers for a few hours exhilarated me. Also, as with groups such as Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous, and with my Resolutions Chart, we gave one another a sense of accountability.
    Only after we’d met a few times did I stumble on some career-building articles that suggested forming a “community of aspirants” or, in less elaborate terms, a “goals group.” Shoot, I’d thought I’d invented the idea.
    WORK SMART.
    Turning aside from lofty ambition to prosaic details, I figured that I’d work better if I spent some time thinking about how to boost my efficiency. At the very least, I could make my day feel calmer. I felt as if I never had enough time for all the work I wanted to do.
    I started paying close attention to how I spent my days. Were there pockets of time that I was wasting? Could I find the equivalent of loose change under the sofa, like an overlooked habit of watching a Law & Order rerun every night? Alas, I was running pretty close to efficiency. If I was watching a rerun, I was paying bills at the same time. Nevertheless, considering the way I spent my time yielded some good results.
    I changed the way I thought about productive time. In the past, I’d believed that I couldn’t sit down and write productively unless I had at least three or four hours with no interruptions. Often, that was hard to arrange, and I felt inefficient and frustrated. To test that assumption, for a few weeks, I added a note on my Resolutions Chart to remind myself of what I’d worked on each day. It didn’t take me long to see that Idid better when I had less time. Not several hours but ninety minutes turned out to be the optimally efficient length of time—long enough for me to get some real work done but not so long that I started to goof off or lose concentration. As a consequence, I began to organize my day into ninety-minute writing blocks, separated by different non-writing tasks: exercising, meeting someone, making a phone call, tinkering with my blog.
    Also, although I’d always considered fifteen minutes to be too short a period in which to get anything done, I started to push myself to squeeze in an extra fifteen minutes somewhere during the day. This was often wedged in between two appointments or at the very end of the workday. It did, indeed, boost my productivity. Fifteen minutes a day, several times a week, was not insignificant—fifteen minutes was long enough to draft a blog post, to make notes on research