We all want to be happy. We want to enjoy what we do every day.  But how much of our time is spent doing things we genuinely enjoy? And how much of the time that we spend doing things we think we love are we actually enjoying?

Often, how we spend our time and what genuinely brings us joy is not alignment.  We are chasing happiness but we are running in the wrong direction.

Diagnostic Tool 1: Focus

The first tool is a simple exercise that compares where you spend the majority of your focus and what provides you the greatest level of joy:

1. List the 5 things or activities that you give the majority of your focus to in relation to your happiness.
2. List the 5 things or activities that give you the most joy.

When people do this exercise, they find that the first list usually entails those things in the future that will provide happiness at some future time (To learn why this is a problem , read my previous post Are You Mortgaging Your Happiness?) and that will not provide enduring enjoyment.  They are often in response to some materialistic desire or an attempt to mitigate a presently stressful situation. Some common items on the list are:

• Purchasing some item in the future - clothing, electronic gadgets or a vacation
• Researching and thinking about how great it would be to lose weight
• Thinking about how great it would be to have more money

Meanwhile, the activities on the second list are usually easy to engage in and occur in the present. Common answers are:

• Spending time with family and friends
• Learning something new
• Engaging in a hobby

Diagnostic Tool 2: Pleasure Logging

This simple exercise is something you engage over the period of a week with the aim of gaining self-awareness that will help you increase your day-to-day levels of enjoyment. Here is an outline:

1. Carry a notepad and pen around with you everywhere for a week.
2. Every time you are about to start a new activity, estimate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how fun or enjoyable you believe the activity will be.
3. After completing the activity, write down how enjoyable it was on a scale of 1 to 10.
4. At the end of a week, take all the data you've accumulated and group it by activity and analyze the results

When I did this exercise, I came to the following conclusions:

1. I am poor at estimating how enjoyable an activity will be for me. I regularly overestimated how pleasurable a seemingly enjoyable activity would be and how bad a seemingly boring activity would be.
2. I spent a lot of my free time engaging in activities that were only a 6 or 7 out of 10 where I could have easily spent that time doing something that was far more enjoyable - a 9 or 10.
3. I decided to drop several activities that I found were sufficiently beneficial to me. The most significant effect was my decision to stop watching television. Even when watching my favorite shows, I recorded an enjoyment level of only 7. Meanwhile, that time could have been spent doing activities that are far more enjoyable, such as learning something new, exercising or spending time with friends.

Try out the exercises and see the results you get. Perhaps, instead of trying to seek happiness in the future, it would be smarter to reprioritize how you are spending your time day-to-day.