Otherwise titled: “Forget all the self-help books: the one way to have a happy life is to actually want to be happy.”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post that reflected upon Stefan Sagmeister’s talk on how design—and your job—can make you happy. I’ve been thinking about life and happiness quite a bit recently, but still remain puzzled about the whole notion. After all, the whole concept of happiness is problematic: attempting to create a measurable metric for something that is not only completely unquantifiable, but also entirely subjective, is close to impossible.

Now, I’m well aware that Bhutan has a Gross National Happiness indicator, so measuring the abstract notion of happiness is perhaps possible, but it still doesn’t mean it is easy to quantify. In fact, I’d argue that happiness is perhaps even harder to measure than sadness, as people are quick to point out when things aren’t going their way.

So today, I’m going to put all hedonimetrics aside and reflect upon happiness as a notion that can’t be measured and compared: instead, I’m going to look at happiness as something that acts as a guiding principle for life.

More than just work

My previous post looked at how the work environment could make us happy. Indeed, more and more people are realizing that the pleasure that you get from their work is an important indicator of their disposition in the rest of your life. However, the focus has shifted from ‘what you do’ at work to ‘how you do it’ instead. A recent article on Web Worker Daily indicated that one of the most important thing that people expect from their jobs is “increased trust between employer and employee,” rather than simply just meaningful tasks to complete.

It is easy to cave into the temptation to rest our emotional well-being on work: as someone that works for about 75 hours a week, I do it all the time. It is easy to forget that relationships, the environment, and your own personal outlook are equally important influences on a person’s joviality.

More than just friends

A recent article by Todd Pitock on Jugglezine on happiness reminded me of the Talmudic saying that stated: “Love without criticism is no love at all.” Easily forgotten, this nugget of wisdom often seems contrary to most advice on happiness, but is in fact the perfect complement to it all. When we’re told to “surround ourselves with the right people,” we often forget that the right people also include people that will give perspective, negative or positive, to any endeavor.

The same article on Jugglezine went on to say:

Ideally, good relationships, which are a component of happiness, thrive with a degree of negativity. One workplace study showed that business teams who had a three-to-one positive-to-negative ratio of interactions did best. Those who were ten-to-one were as ineffective as teams who were disproportionately negative.

Happiness, at its root, is based in satisfaction and value. A true feeling of value comes not only from unabashed praise, but from constructive criticism and realistic engagement. You can’t argue that the Talmudic sages got it right.

More than just achievement

I’ve extolled the virtues of Twitter before, but I’ll give you yet another example of why I’m such a big fan of the service. A few weeks ago, Anil Dash posted a tweet (which I replicated on Squandrous) that had one simple nugget of wisdom — a quick quote that actually ended up being the impetus for this post: “Happiness is being good at something.”

I still have the SMS with that message saved on my phone. It acts as a reminder that I don’t necessarily have to do something great in order to be happy — I just need to take what I do all the time and do them well.

If we take, again, happiness as being based in satisfaction and value, Anil’s tweet rings even truer: instead of value being placed in specific achievement, value is being put in a repeated pattern of behavior, whether small or large in impact. The best part of the statement is that everyone is good at something if they just think about it, so everyone, in essence, has something to be happy about.

More than just self-help

I’m no self-help guru, but since you’re here, I’ll tell you my secret: the reason I’m happy these days is because I’m making a conscious effort to be happy. Yes, you can put away all those self-help books and “how to be happy” lists you’ve bookmarked (though I quite like Behance’s 100 Tips to Improve Your Life, so don’t throw that one away) and do one simple thing to actually be happy, and that’s just to be happy.

Too many people depend on external forces and external valuation to validate their self-worth — while the thoughts of others, the things you do, and the places where you work, play and live all have their merit, the most important determinant of self-worth is the self. Makes sense to me.

In order to do this, people like Steven Shapiro encourage getting rid of your goals in order to live a happy life. While I do agree with some of what Shapiro says—particularly his ideas on breaking out of routine and being open to doing things that aren’t objective-oriented—I disagree that happiness comes from shedding objective-based behavior. Instead, happiness should be a primary goal — and not this abstract, long-term vision of Utopian and ideal happiness, but a daily sentiment of pleasure and contentment.

Easy to say, I know, but not so easy to do. The steps, however, are easy to take if you break them down: smile at random people on the street, be courteous in traffic, take some time out to read a good magazine article. Making a conscious effort to be happy may seem like an eccentric and oddball thing to do, but no matter how strange it seems, the payoff is worth it.

Otherwise titled: “Everyone needs to get out of the home office and get some social interaction once in a while, so here’s where I go and why I do it.”

Being a web worker surely has its perks: you get to set your own hours, you get to pick projects that mean something to you, you get to decide where you do your work, and you get escape the horrors of cubicle dementia.

But being a web worker also has several downsides, one of them being the lack of colleagues with whom to interact and socialize. While working in an office is often quasi-claustrophobic, and while your coworkers can be annoying at times, there is definitely an appeal in having someone to talk to and run ideas by from time to time.

Which is why it’s no surprise that many web workers pack up their Macbooks and head outside their home office to the wild outdoors—into the bustling world of coffee shops, restaurants, and bookstores—in order to find a working environment which perfectly balances all their noise, interaction, privacy, and ambiance concerns.

The perks of working away from home

I have a perfectly great office set up (and once I get my new iMac, it will be even better) in my apartment: all the tools I need for my work at my disposal, a window beside my desk, flowers bringing some color to the room, a strong wifi connection, and a kitchen (with a stocked fridge) a short saunter away.

What my office doesn’t have, however, is people. I consider myself good company, but occasionally, I need to stop talking to the mirror and engage in some random and meaningless conversation with strangers. Plus, the little home office setup isn’t all too great for meetings either.

Working in a coffee shop is the ideal environment for someone that thrives on human connections; in the worst case scenario, at least you’ll be able to talk to the barista as you order your drink. Most locations offer the perfect people-watching environment, and for those in the creative industries—designers, writers, musicians, filmmakers—having access to the hustle and bustle of everyday street life is imperative.

I’ve learned that people in coffee shops, bookstores, or any other place where it is common to do your work, are more likely to strike up a conversation with you when you seem to need a break. My Macbook has a pretty elaborate skin on it, so I regularly get people asking me about it, and have made several new acquaintances that way. These people are often web workers as well, and eventually end up becoming like colleagues: people you can throw new ideas against and who are always willing to share best practices and feedback.

The challenge of finding a good mobile office

Finding the right place to work is not an easy task. While I may ascribe to the simple requirements as outlined by Web Worker Daily—“wifi, food/beverages, power outlets and no one expecting you to leave the minute you finish whatever you’ve ordered to eat or drink”—each person has their own preferences that need to be accommodated.

I, for one, can not work in complete silence; I need the hubbub of a crowd or at least some decent background music in order to feel productive. Matt Villano says that “the key to being productive outside of a traditional office is finding a spot that’s conducive to creativity:”

People who do their best work in complete silence, for instance, probably wouldn’t be able to concentrate at a Starbucks. Alternately, for people like Henn—those who need hubbub to feel alive—the public library likely would lead to frustration. Other places, such as bookstores, offer the best of both worlds—a constant buzz of chatter but relative quietude.

Cost can end up being quite a big issue as well: not only do some places charge for wifi access, but if you’re going to be spending considerable time taking up space at a private establishment, there is some expectation that you will be offering that place some kind of compensation—most often, by making sure you’re buying a constant stream of coffee.

I’m partial to Starbucks (mainly because of the fact that they offer fantastic coffee, great music, and the best people-watching environment) but with wifi access hitting $10/day and my coffee bill for three hours adding up to that same amount, working at the popular coffee shop can get expensive. In Toronto, popular restaurants like Richtree Market and Lettuce offer free wireless to their patrons, but your food spending will generally still play havoc with your wallet.

One cost-effective option, especially if you plan to be spending a considerable amount of time each month working outside your home, is using coworking facilities. Coworking spaces are often excellent places for the web worker community, offering quiet work areas for independent endeavors and meeting spaces for group collaboration. If you’re in Toronto and are interested in coworking, I’d check out places like the Linux Caffe and Indoor Playground.

The best option in Toronto, at least, is to become a member of Wireless Toronto and enjoy free wifi access in many great locations around the city. These locations include coffee shops, pubs, restaurants, parks, and even public spaces like Dundas Square. If it’s not raining, there are few places in the world as exciting and calming to work in as the rooftop garden at 401 Richmond.

The necessity to focus on work rather than play

Even if you do find the perfect office-away-from-office, one fact remains: there’s still work to be done. It is remarkably easy to forget that fact when you’re surrounded by like-minded individuals in a coffee shop, or staring at passers-by on a patio, or even browsing through graphic novels at a bookstore. The ubiquitous availability of wifi makes it even easier to squander your time instead of doing any real work.

So how to keep focus? Well, everyone has their own ways, but there are a few tips I have to make sure that working in public stays as work rather than play:

• Invest in a good pair of headphones. Not only do good headphones keep unwanted noise out, but they’re a great indicator to other people that you’re not to be disturbed.
• Close your web browser. If I left Firefox open all day, I’d never get anything done. If you’re a writer, fire up your favorite text editor in fullscreen mode (Photoshop for designers, Final Cut Pro for filmmakers, etc.) and block out the web for forty minute at a time, at least.
• Get up and move around. You’ll get restless sitting in the same place all day, even if that same place is a rooftop garden. Stretch your legs and get the blood flowing through your body—it will make sure your body, and subsequently your brain, doesn’t get tired.
• Eat well. It might be easy to subside on a diet of Sumatran coffee and biscotti when you’re sitting at a coffee shop, but you need some protein and some vegetables too. Make sure you’re well nourished, and your concentration won’t be stolen by your grumbling stomach.
• Make it clear that you’re working. It might be nice to say hullo to everyone that passes your table, but that also invites people to come and start conversation. While there is a place for pleasantries, when you’re in work mode, don’t let your wandering eyes invite other people to come disturb you.
• Smile. Chances are, if you’re a web worker, you love your work. Show it. Not only will that help your creative processes, but every now and then when you catch your smile in the reflection of your glossy screen, you’ll be spurred on to keep doing what you’re doing.

Okay, so not all of those tips are necessarily just for working away from the office, but they all come in handy. There are many other things you can do to keep your focus—and websites like Lifehacker and Web Worker Daily are great resources when it comes to finding more tips of this sort—but the important thing to remember that, no matter where you end up taking your work out with you, is that you’re enjoying not only where you are, but what you’re doing.

If that’s the case, then the world is your office.

Otherwise titled: “How I cut down my list of RSS feeds and podcasts and why the ubiquitous availability of digital data storage has made me a pack-rat.”

Two weeks ago, I sat down and decided to get a handle on all my subscriptions. I realized earlier this month that I had more subscriptions than I could possibly keep up with, and it didn’t make sense spending time filing and classifying content that I had no intention of ever consuming.

So I made a small inventory of what I had: 17 magazine subscriptions, 72 podcasts subscriptions, and 2,432 blog subscriptions. As you can imagine, such a large inventory was overwhelming, so I decided to take out six hours of my weekend and devote myself to getting my subscriptions under control.

Sifting through the magazine pile

Figuring out which magazine subscriptions to keep and which to cancel was relatively easy, and I’m guessing the added money in my bank account will be appreciated when the next billing cycle rolls around.

My process for filtering my magazines was simple: I went through the pile of unread magazines in the corner of my room, and saw which titles came up most often. I canceled those subscriptions, leaving me with only four magazine subscriptions now: The New Yorker, The Walrus, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly.

Clearing up some iPod space

I had already reached a point where I had stopped transferring some podcasts over to my iPod because I just wouldn’t have the time to listen to them (or watch them in the case of video podcasts) before the next update came out. Those subscriptions were the first to go.

Next, I asked myself whether I actually got more utility (and yes, entertainment was considered utility) from each podcast as compared to the time I had to expend listening to or watching it. Those that fell on the wrong side of the scale were deleted.

Finally, I realized that I actually enjoyed audio podcasts much more than video, so I pruned my list of video podcasts to only those I found essential. In the end, I was left with sixteen podcasts (five video, eleven audio) that I felt I could follow effectively.

Switching my RSS reading habits

I always thought I was pretty judicious when it came to adding feeds to NetNewsWire, but when I realized that I was trying to keep up with over two thousand sites every day, I knew my feed subscriptions had gone out of control. How to get them back under control seemed like a daunting task. I was determined to go from my obscenely large number of subscriptions to just under a thousand.

My first task was to switch my RSS reader. I was happy with NetNewsWire, but knew that if I was to make a clean break from the blog overload I was already suffering from, I would need a complete change of environment. I had been reading some rave reviews about Google Reader — a product I had tested back when it was first launched — and thought I’d give it another try despite being pretty disappointed the first time around.

Google Reader does not work well when you subscribe to 2,432 feeds: the updates are slow, the AJAX interface is buggy, and everything just seems cumbersome. This, in fact, was a blessing in disguise. Knowing that Google Reader would only really work well for me if I kept my subscription numbers very low, I was forced to re-evaluate my goal: perhaps even a thousand feeds would be too much.

So I began to chop. The first feeds to go were the ones that didn’t update regularly enough, followed by the ones that hadn’t updated in several months. Next on the chopping block were feeds that I routinely ignored because I had lost interest in them. Finally, I applied my utility test to every RSS feed that remained and was left with 132 feeds that I then imported into Google Reader. I had surpassed even my own expectations.

What was the point of all of this?

In the meatspace, I’m the complete opposite of a pack-rat. I throw things away that I should keep; I give things away that I still want; I get rid of any clutter around me. In the virtual world — as this post clearly demonstrates — I’m a hoarder. Why the big change?

The first, of course, is because digital storage is so darn cheap. With Gmail offering over 2GB of storage space, there is no longer any reason to start deleting emails (until you get to the point where your Gmail account is almost full like I did four months ago), and with desktop and web search being so good, there is no real reason to worry about not being able to find things. While space in the real world is constrained, space in the digital world doesn’t seem to be as hard to find.

The second reason may not apply to everyone, but much of my digital pack-rattery comes from my obsession to consume more and more information. In what some call today’s “information age,” getting content and media to consume is easy for almost anyone: the difficult part is filtering that content in order to find the relevant and purposeful information. That filtering process takes a long time, and in the digital age, it ends up being easier to just consume more and more rather than critically filter media.

This trend, at least in my life, has to stop. So here’s my commitment: at any given moment, I will only subscribe to as many podcasts and feeds that I feel that I can truly engage with. That number is probably sitting at 20 podcasts and 200 RSS feeds. Next time I start complaining that I’m feeling swamped with reading and listening to catch up on, remind me that I could always just filter that content and concentrate on what is truly important.

(If you’re a digital pack-rat like me, Zen Habits posted a 3-step cure this past Monday.)

Otherwise titled: “An incredibly long post on how Mark Zuckerberg’s bad decisions led to my Facebook fatigue and could possibly lead to the implosion of his admired application.”

Over the past twelve days since I deactivated my Facebook account, I have had dozens of emails and SMS messages asking me why I left the service so abruptly. To most of those inquiries, I say that I am suffering from Facebook fatigue.

Upon closer inspection, I’ve realized that there are two facets to my fatigue: one is similar to Jason Calacanis’ reasons for claiming Facebook bankruptcy, and the other is because is perhaps reflective of a general sense of social network fatigue that I am feeling.

Facebook Bankruptcy

My first reason for deactivating Facebook originates from the day they introduced the developer platform for the site. Since then, I have been inundated by requests (sometimes over 200 a day) from some of my 2000 friends on the site for various pointless applications that I have no interest in and provide no utility to me at all. To quote Jason Calacanis:

Yes, I love Zombies, but no I don’t want to be turned into one. Yes, I like fortune cookies, but no I don’t want a virtual one. Yes, I’d love to play Texas Holdem for a couple of hours - but not online.

Someone once gave me a Facebook “gift”, an icon of a cup of coffee that she purchased off the site for $1, claiming that she knew I was a java-holic and she thought I’d appreciate the cup of joe. While I was thankful for the sentiment, I did remind her that for an additional forty cents she could have bought me a real cup of coffee from Starbucks and we could have had some meaningful meatspace discussion.

I’ll agree that part of this is my fault for having too many contacts on the site, and especially for having too many contacts that aren’t savvy enough to realize that most of these silly applications are a huge waste of my time. That being said, I don’t have the time to deal with requests I don’t care about from people I barely speak to anymore. And when I’m spending more time declining requests than I am doing more productive things on the site, then you know I’m in over my head. It’s like email all over again.

Social Network Fatigue

I’ve been spending less time on Flickr, Last.fm, Upcoming, and many other social networking applications these days. Instead, I’ve been spending more time with applications like Twitter and Dopplr. I’ve realized that the reason I’ve been withdrawing from some social networks and not others is because many applications do not offer enough of a return for the time I spend with them.

Return on investment is incredibly important in all facets of life, so why not in social networking applications? I still do get some use from the recommendation engines in things like Upcoming and Last.fm, and while I do use CC images from Flickr in my projects, so they’re worth keeping around for a bit. After all, I can repurpose the content I put on those sites into my various other properties on the web.

Facebook, however, gives me no return at all. There is no incentive to post notes, items, photos, and events on Facebook because all the content I do post on the site is closed within the site and can not be reused elsewhere on the web. Essentially, Facebook is forcing me to log on to their site to see my own content.

I wrote about this phenomenon recently as a comment on a blog post by Pema Hegan where he said that Facebook scores high points in openness. I humbly disagreed:

Pema, those are some good thoughts, and while I agree completely with your score you give Facebook on security and reliability (well, maybe I might give their reliability a score slightly lower than six), I would give Facebook the complete opposite of “top marks” when it comes to openness. In fact, I would argue that the Facebook is essentially the complete antithesis of the concept of openness on the web.

I agree with Jason Kottke when he says that Facebook is reminiscent of an old property that approached the web in the same closed way. Zuckerberg needs to think about that before we all start to, in a few years, remember poking as fad from the past just like free AOL CDs.

This is the second cause of my Facebook fatigue, and one of the major reasons I decided to deactivate my account. The balance of time invested versus utility was just too skewed in one direction.

So, What’s Next?

I’ll inevitably be back to Facebook in the next few weeks: the lack of the ability to export my events to iCal has made me somewhat reliant on the site to find out the location and time of random get-togethers. Which I guess was Zuckerberg’s goal after all - everyone has to come back to his closed platform in the end.

What he doesn’t realize is that (if the service stays the way it is right now) eventually, when enough people get tired of being dependent of Facebook and realize that the openness and pervasiveness of the world wide web is much more conducive to virtual socialization, the little application-that-could is going to die a slow death from the inside out.

Update: If you share some of my thoughts about the frustrations of Facebook being a closed platform, know that we’re not alone. Wired just ran a story on walled-off social networks, and posted a how-to on creating the Facebook experience outside the Facebook platform. Also, microformats.org is hosting a discussion on social network portability on their wiki.