80/20 principle for happiness.

In the mornings, I do my personal ritual of happiness I call "an hour for myself", where I just do things I enjoy without any judgement or attempts to be useful. Today, during this hour, I recognized that a very simple activity brings me joy: journaling, sitting on the corner of the couch close to a window with blinds open, morning sun flickering on my face, sipping hot coffee. So simple, so useless, so fulfilling.

It got me thinking: how much time should we spend on things and activities we truly enjoy? Then I remembered the Pareto principle, which states that 20% of effort brings 80% of results.

What if we apply it to happiness and spend 20% of our time doing things we "have-to-do" in our adult lives: obligations, paperwork, chores, bureaucracy, talking to technical support, small talks, annoying parenting activities like school meetings, staying in lines, and many more; you probably know yours.

If we sleep 8 hours and have 16 hours of active hours in a day, we should dedicate approximately 3-4 hours per day to obligatory activities, leaving 12-13 hours for things we enjoy. In that case, you get the best results from mandatory commitments and enjoy the biggest part of your life.

But how to build a life where you enjoy 80% of your day?

By looking into activities you enjoy the least, but they drain the most of your day. For many people, it might be work. If you enjoy 100% of your job, you are already ahead of many people.

Despite people complaining about their jobs all the time, the satisfaction rate is rarely in absolutes. Most people enjoy some parts of their work and don’t enjoy the others. Find the way to do more things you like and optimize or eliminate the rest.

If you don’t enjoy most of your work hours, maybe it’s time to look at the bigger picture: maybe this career is not for you? Maybe this particular job isn’t a good fit? Maybe it’s time to make some drastic changes? I can tell you from experience that changing careers is hard but well worth it in the end.

Same goes for any other activities. Hate going to the gym? Find sport activities you love. Spending too much time on paperwork or chores? Think about how to optimize and automate them. I also recommend taking a serious look at time spent on social media and other mindless digital activities. As I recently learned, this doesn’t bring joy for most people.

If you don’t know what you like, spending time discovering your passions is also worth it. Once activities are discovered, they bring you a lot of happiness.

I should mention that I see this not as a strict rule but rather as a path. Many people might never find a way to build a life where 3-4 hours is enough for mandatory things. But by striving towards it, you find yourself on a very pleasing journey.

Step-by-step, replace your biggest time-sinkers with meaningful activities, and one day, you’ll find yourself happy, without thinking about the principals applied.