I am writing this on the plane, on my way back from a week-long business trip. I’m exhausted and it’s been a long week. I hate being away for this long and I also hate coming back feeling down and grumpy from all the travel/work stuff. My fam is psyched to see me and I’m dying to see them (and it’s movie night - no one should be grumpy on movie night!) So I’m determined to do something about this, to lift the business trip exhaustion fog and feel happier — and do it in a very short amount of time I have before I see my crew.

I’ve been studying happiness for a few years now, reading every book and article and study I can find. I am really interested in what we know about our own happiness (not a lot, according to one of my favorite happiness experts, Daniel Gilbert) and what we can do to feel happier (if you read one book about it, read Flourish). Time to put all this reading to work: Here are some quick small things you can do to feel happier, right now:

• Think of something good about your day today. It can be the smallest tiniest thing. Or it can be big. But it doesn’t have to be. Here’s mine: I got a kale, broccoli, apple and celery juice at the airport and it was great. Also, it was a lot healthier than what I’ve been eating this week, so I feel like I’m changing directions for the better.
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How much time do your kids get with an iPad/iPhone/computer?

Lately I find myself having this conversation a lot with friends and other moms at my daughter’s school. Everyone seems to be wondering what’s enough, what’s too much, and how everyone else is dealing with preventing the wave of technology from completely overtaking their homes and kids’ minds. And like every parenting decision, it’s not easy and not black and white.

I have spent the last ten years of my career working in technology and I am big enough to admit that yes, I am quite inseparable from my iPhone. A lot of it is for work but a lot of it is for things outside of work: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and a bunch of other time-takers. We have an iPad at home and a laptop in the office. My husband and I often spend the evenings sitting next to each other working on our respective work laptops.

Do I like that technology is such a huge part of our life? Absolutely not. I think there are ways in which it is bad for our family. We try to be as disciplined as we can - no phones when we are eating, no background TV, etc. - but we’re absolutely not perfect. It is a core part of our daily lives and while we can blame it on work, the reality is that that’s not the only reason we’re attached to our gadgets.
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We’ve got a pretty set routine most nights after work. My husband or I come home by 6pm to relieve the babysitter, who picks up our daughter from school. (We trade off nights when one of us can work late or hit the gym after work while the other gets home right on time. It’s something that allows our two-somewhat-crazy-job household to function.) When I get home, I hang with our kiddo for a bit in the kitchen, asking her about her day. Then it’s homework time, piano practice time, and if we have time left, we try to play a game or read together.

The other night I asked our daughter my usual coming-through-the-door question: “How was your day today?”

She said it was good and that they played museum on the playground (I think more adults need to play museum at work, but that’s for another post). And then she did something that startled me a little. She asked me how my day was.
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I don’t make a lot of New Year’s resolutions. I used to and I learned my lesson. The routine went something like this: Make too many resolutions. Set expectations too high. A few months later realize I’m failing. Feel bad. This was not productive so I stopped vowing to do things like lose weight or eat more broccoli or try to be better about remembering friends’ birthdays. (If you’ve been in a similar boat, don’t feel bad, it’s completely normal. Americans constantly overstimate how well they will stick to their New Year’s resolutions.)

No more big resolutions lists for me, thank you. But I do like the idea of having one theme for the year, one thing I’ll try to focus on. I guess you can call that a resolution but one is better than ten, right? So here’s my big theme for 2012:

Appreciate the good stuff more.

Yep, that simple. There is a lot of science that shows when you focus on the good things you have and are grateful for them, you are happier.
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My daughter is a really good kid. Of course we all think our kids are good kids but there is a general consensus amongs friends and family that she is well-behaved, nice, and all-around not a lot of trouble. I dig that. But there is one thing that I’ve been pestering her about endlessly, especially as we’re in the midst of the holiday season: Saying thank you and please more often.

We’ve had lots of presents giving and lots of meals with friends and family, all of which made me realize that my daughter doesn’t remember her manners as often as I think she should. She is 7 and to be honest, I think most of the time when she doesn’t say thank you after finishing a meal or getting a present it’s because she is off to the next thing or she is excited to play with the new thing she just got. When I remind her to say thank you or to use please when she is asking anyone for anything — including family, friends or strangers — she is quick to do it.
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The holidays are stressful.

However you slice it, there is too much to do in a short period of time (unless you’re a super-planner and got it all done in October), you’re running from one family gathering to another work function, and not seeing much of that me-time for a few weeks in a row. But this year I am determined to stop looking at the holidays as a series of to-dos and actually chillax and enjoy some of them. It won’t work 100% (I know already because I am stressing over this pile of cards I need to send out) but I think I can tame the holiday anxiety monster a bit.

Here are 5 things I’m going to try to do:

• Walk or do yoga every day. I’m going to be really stubborn about this. These are two things I do that calm my nerves and energize me to deal with whatever stress ball is aiming at me that day. So even though routine flies out the window in a few days, I’m going to figure out how to do some yoga or take a walk every day between now and New Years. Determination!

• Accept the fact that late is better than never. There is no way these holidays cards are going out on time. They are New Year’s cards, something we do every year because (1) New Year is great to celebrate and (2) this gives me extra time to send them out. But I am going to accept the fact that some won’t get to our friends or family until well after the New Year and that’s OK. Look at it this way: They will stand out from the plethora of other cards they’ve gotten… on time.
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Yesterday was one of those Tuesdays which felt like ten terrible not very good Mondays squished in one. I’ll spare you the details, other than to say that it started with my sitting in traffic for over an hour and missing an important meeting and involved spilled tea, temporarily lost phone and forgetting to call someone I really needed to call. Yowsa. Needless to say by the time I got home I was cranky and exhausted.

I don’t know about you, but one of the first things that goes when I am exhausted is patience (and no, I’m not a very patient person to begin with). So when my kiddo - who also happened to be pretty tired - was goofing off as we practiced piano, I got upset. When she left her dinner dishes on the table and walked out of the kitchen, I gave her a lecture on my not being her made and her needing to clean up the dishes (it’s one of her responsibilities in our family.) You get the idea — it was one of those evenings.

After I put her to bed, had some tea and caught my breath a bit I felt pretty terrible.
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I’ve come up with a new way to look at this whole impossible work-life balance idea today and I couldn’t wait to share it with you guys here.

For a while I’ve been using the term “work-life juggle” to refer to this hectic but awesome life we have as working parents. On any given day, I juggle work stuff, kiddo stuff, family stuff, household stuff, parents stuff, friends and other social stuff, and a bunch of other stuffs. Sometimes I juggle a ton of things at once, sometimes I get a break and it’s only a few. But when we say juggle, we mean that we’re juggling separate different things, holding just one or two of them at a time. And I think the reality is that we blend work and life constantly, like a kick-ass powerful blender (I prefer the red KitchenAid, but you can pick your favorite.)

For me, looking at my days this way makes me feel a lot less crazed and a little more happy. Take today, for example:

I had an early morning meeting that was work-related. But the person I was meeting is someone I’ve known for a while so I also consider him a friend. Spending time together is enjoyable, even when we talk about stressful work stuff. Plus we met at a coffee shop, so I got to enjoy one of my favorite coffee drinks while we talked. Work + friend + a little luxury = a great blend of a bunch of different things.
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This has been a nutty year on all fronts but one of the things I’m pretty proud of is that I’ve not thrown out taking care of myself out the window. That had been my usual pattern when things got stressful and as I’ve shared here before, to not great outcomes. Taking a morning walk, yoga at least two or three times a week, generally clean eating (which for me means less sugar, white stuff and serious daily doses of veggies, fruit, nuts and fish) — I’ve kept up with these habits (not perfectly, but that would be a silly goal) and they’ve helped me maintain some degree of sanity and dare I say, well-being!, during this year. I so so highly recommend you do one of them if you don’t already.

But there has been one thing which I KNOW is important for health and sanity that I’ve continued to struggle with: sleep. I just don’t get enough of it.
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Procrastination gets a bad rep and I can see why. I had a difficult work email to write earlier and I spent a half hour procrastinating — reading Huff Post entertainment articles, cleaning up the kitchen, staring at my computer screen and wishing it would write itself. I wasted a bunch of time, during which the email was weighing on my mind, and I wasn’t the better for it.

But I don’t think all procrastination is bad. Or rather, I think it’s impossible to avoid completely. Sometimes you have a task to get done that you completely loathe to start or are intimidated to begin. There are mornings when I come to work, for example, and feel so overwhelmed with what’s on my plate that I need some kind of a a warm-up to roll up my sleeves and get into the working mode. So my new motto is that if I’m going to procrastinate, I’m going to try and be productive about it. Here are my three favorite ways:

• Read an article online, but just one, and hopefully not one related to the task I’m procrastinating to do. I often top to the New York Times health, technology, or style and fashion sections to find something interesting. But here’s the deal: Don’t click on any of the links in or around the article. The rule is just one article, then back to the task at hand.
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