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Comment by kalid | Hacker News Reader

I like the phrasing of the title, i.e. keeping track of what actually works.

One tip that's helped me: when something makes you feel good, add it to feelgood.txt. Over time, you'll start to see patterns (vs. the random, fallible memories/ideas we have about what makes us happy).

Every few days or so I'll have a random entry [7/23/09: felt good to chill with Andreas. played games, chatted, had bfast, etc. hospitality. nice to catch up. 7/15/09: Felt good to 1) post to BE and 2) exercise today].

Looking back, I can see what actually worked in making me happy.

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I like that. A lot.

I'm going to create a feelgood.txt on my work computer right now. I'm also thinking about creating a feelbad.txt - so I know what to avoid in my life.

The flip side of this is it can be very hard to make changes in your life when you realize that people to whom you may be very close .. are no longer good for you.

I came back here to this comment. How has anyone dealt with this situation?

Can you email me with your phone number? I'll give you a call. (zackster@gmail.com)

Awesome, I didn't even think about having a feelbad.txt list! I might need to do that too, attacking the problem from both sides.

I have something very much like your feelgood idea. I made a tab for myself on http://bulletxt.com where I record all the things that I like to do and every now and then, I look at it to find out what else to do. Currently on my list: kayaking, Scrabble, comedy club, and theme parks.

Nice, I have a "Funstuff" list which are things I like to do: drawing, karate, acoustic guitar listening...

It's funny how we need to write these down, but we do. Off the top of my head I can "forget" that I like to draw when I'm bored. In a similar way, sometimes we have to "remember" what makes us happy.

Great idea! I made a remember-mode template for emacs so I can store happy thoughts whenever they occur.

If you use org-mode and remember-mode you can add this template to your org-remember-templates: ("Happy Thought" ?h "* %U %?" "~/happy.org" "Happy Thoughts")

Doing so made me happy, so I added it to the file, which in-turn produced happiness. Ahhh, recursive happiness.

Ah, I've recently switched to vim so I can't reap the benefits :).

I have contemplated geeking out and tagging these entries [blog] [exercise] and similar, so I could later analyze what areas give me the most satisfaction. But that's too much -- it's enjoyable just browsing through vs. letting grep do all the work.

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