Vacation (or happiness) planner

Would you believe if I say that by rephrasing one question, we were able to change our paradigm and eventually make our life simple?

 Our family is going on a vacation to India in a few weeks. As you could imagine, we are busy with planning the activities that we wanted to do back home. It's been 3 years since we last visited, as a result our to-do list kept growing. As we started to list down the activities, we soon figured out that we would either be exhausted by doing all the activities or be disappointed by not meeting our expectations. We sat down to prioritise the list of things we wanted to do in the given time but it was going nowhere. We would be taking it out of the list but would end up adding it again.

          One fine morning, my wife (also a 7 habits reader) and I sat down to apply "Begin with the end in mind" habit to our vacation planner. Instead of asking the question,

"What are the activities that we wanted to do during the vacation?"

we rephrased the question into,

"What should we do during the vacation, that would make us feel happy at the end of it?"

We wrote down individual lists of activities, that would make us feel happy at the end of the trip. What we found out was all the activities that we really wanted to do were falling under three main categories:

• Spend quality time with parents
• Meet people who have genuine interest in us
• All the more important enjoy us out there

Once we figured out our main thing, it was infinitely easy to finalise the plan. We were able to cut down on unnecessary shopping plans or outstation trips. In addition to that, we saw some of the small activities such as taking my kid to the school in which I studied and show the environment I grew up emerged. I am confident that if I hadn't rephrased the question, such meaningful and memorable activities wouldn't have come up.

The intent of this paradigm is not to reduce the number of activities to do. It is an opportunity for the future self to help the current self in deciding what it really wants.

Weekend Planning: Once we saw the merits of this paradigm, we started applying the same to our weekend plan as well. Instead of asking the question, 

"How do we want to spend the weekend?" 

we transformed the question into, 

"What should we do over the weekend, that would make us feel happy at the end of it?"

By asking this one question we were able to reduce our trips to stores or malls, instead spend those quality time with kids on activities we love the most.


"The main thing is to keep the main thing The Main Thing" - Stephen R. Covey