The Happiness Plan

Overview

The Happiness Plan Planner is your key to charting out your own future and creating the road map to get there.

In this guide, we’ll cover each page of the planner and how it can be used.

Keep in mind that you only need to use the parts that work for you. That’s the beauty of The Happiness Plan.

Intro

A Quick Overview

I don’t like those self inflating intros so I’ll keep this short. I’d rather get to the good stuff!

I won’t make you unreal promises just to hype you up.

I will make you this one, solid , heart felt promise…

If you follow this system your life WILL CHANGE FOR THE BETTER!

How Do I Know?

The Happiness Plan is far more than a goal planner. It is the exact system I used to overcome depression, find purpose in life, and actually achieve it.

After more than 10 years, I am proud to say, that I continue to use The Happiness Plan and it continues to deliver stellar results year after year.

I would not be where I am if not for The Happiness Plan. After more than 10 years of refining, I’m happy to share it with you.

** One thing I did want to mention and I couldn’t really figure out a good place to put it is this…
The Happiness Plan is not set in stone. It is meant to be flexible to fit different needs in different situations. It continues to evolve and improve.
It’s based on my usage and needs. I would love to get feedback on how others are using it, and incorporate other ideas and improvements.

dear future me

A letter to your future self

Writing a letter to yourself is a great way to gauge your progress. How will you know if things are truly improving? Are you really making progress? This is all about your happiness, after all.

What are your hopes and dreams? What do you wish your future self to remember about who and what you are today?

We can’t change the past, but we can address the future.

self assessment

Know where you are

How can you know which way to go if you don’t know where you are?

Take stock in your current situation. acknowledge both the good and the bad. Do it honestly, warts and all.

Own your current self and know this is just one step towards a happier you.

one thing

If you could change just 1 thing

If you had a chance to only change one thing about your current situation in life, what would that be?

Start with looking at each area of your life and choose one thing about each that you would like to change.

Of those, which one is the one to rule them all?

goal brainstorm

It's time for ideas

Everything up to this point was to help you get your brain thinking in the right context. Now it’s time to think of things you might do to improve each area of your life.

This isn’t a time to judge the quality of the idea. Now is the time to just write down as many as you possibly can.

One of the most silly ideas I had inspired me to think of an idea that lead me to achieving something I thought would be impossible…

Just write it down. You never know how it might turn out.

areas of life

Get a little organized

With our list of ideas it’s time to organize them into the 9 areas of life.

Choose the top 3 from each area so we can start to narrow things down and make life easier for ourselves.

This part of the process usually gets updated a few times before I’m finished, so don’t worry too much. If you don’t have 3 in a particular area, that’s fine.

This is a process and it will get easier the more times you go through it.

top 5 ideas

Get a little more focused

We’re going to narrow it down a little bit more.

Choose your top 5 from all 9 areas of life. Our goal is to make small incremental improvements so we need to narrow our focus before we dig deep into the next steps.

get s.m.a.r.t.

Be S.M.A.R.T. about it

If you’ve never heard of S.M.A.R.T. Goals, don’t panic. It can be a little intimidating if you’re a first timer, but don’t worry. I’ll walk you through it and you’ll come out the other side with the confidence to really do this.

identify action steps

Break it down

Once we’ve made the goals S.M.A.R.T. it’s time to break them down into the Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich blueprint.

What steps need to be taken to accomplish the goal?

This is actually one of my favorite parts. I’ve done this in both my personal life and professional career for more than 3 decades.

You’ll be in good hands and we might even make some tastey lunch in the process.

identify objectives

Do it in batches

We’ll get more into this in the detail page, but the overall idea here is to group steps into logical batches.

In the professional project management world we call them milestones.

These are good stopping points within the larger path to accomplishing the goal.

If you’re goal is to cook a meal you might do some prep work the day before.

If you’re goal is to clean the house you might group tasks by room.

These objectives act as potential pauses or shifts in priority and/or moments to celebrate.

potential roadblocks

What could go wrong?

As with everything in life, problems can, and often do, occur.

Thinking ahead and recognizing potential pitfalls is an essential part of reducing the stress and overwhelm.

A happy life isn’t void of problems. A happy life is knowing we have the ability to handle the problems when they arrive.

s.m.a.r.t. priorities

Focus your priorities

You’ve brainstormed, narrowed the focus, refined the ideas, broke them down, and identified potential problems.

Congratulations! Your Happiness Plan is almost complete!

At this point we want to have a quick view of our top 5 S.M.A.R.T. Goals for easy reference during the next phase.

MONTHLY

Where we going this month?

At the beginning of each month it’s really helpful to lay out a high level overview of your plan.

Not a lot of detail here, but it does give you the opportunity to see any major issues that might come up.

You can also use this to line things up with holidays or other specific events/dates and adjust things accordingly without having unplanned surprises.

WEEKLY

What are we doing this week?

Each week we refer to the Monthly plan and plot out the major points of focus during each day of our upcoming week.

At the end of each week we review our progress and make any adjustments to the Monthly and continue making progress.

DAILY

One day at a time

The Daily will be your unsung hero and guide to achieving the results you’re working towards.

You can use as much or as little of the daily as makes sense for you. I personally use most of it in order for me to make note of any changes to plans, or anything else important enough to remember.

THINGS TO WATCH, READ, DO & LEARN

Odds n' Ends

As life happens things come up that aren’t planned. They aren’t exactly part of our specific life goals, but are important enough to take note.

I use this to keep track of books I want to read, movies to watch, and anything else I might want to address sooner or later.

30 day challenge

When it's really important

When you have a goal that is so important that you don’t want to get distracted by anything else…

That’s the secret behind the 30 day challenge.

Pick a goal, plan out your tasks, make note of the objectives, and get super focused…

30 days at a time.