Happiness Runs in a Circular Motion?

This is a repost of the latest article I wrote for Forbes on the trend of tracking your emotions.
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The ability to quantify many areas of our lives has led to the emergence of a new trend – the trend of tracking your emotions, specifically happiness. These apps allow people to track their emotions much like they would track fitness, calories or spending. But, can this focus on tracking happiness actually undermine us, especially in our career or business successes?

The idea of quantifying our activities using technological tools is not new. Many of us use apps like Nike+ or RunKeeper to track our runs, calorie counters such as Meal Snap to track our caloric intake, and financial tools like Mint to track our spending.

Launched in 2009, Track Your Happiness is a mobile research project that allows users to track their happiness and find out what factors – for them personally – are associated with greater happiness. According to data from the app: “46.9% of people's time is spent thinking on something other than what they're doing. In fact, what activity a person was engaged in only accounted for about 5% of a person's happiness, whereas whether that person's mind was on- or off-task accounted for over 10%.” So, in other words, a wandering mind is an “unhappy one.” Some apps are taking this idea even further and are looking at the idea of happiness through a person’s social network. Happstr is a mobile app that allows users to mark geographical locations where they’re feeling happy, and to see others' "happiness spots" on the map. It’s purpose is to get users to focus on and record the best moments of their lives. It enables them to benefit from the well-being of others by sharing that happiness with their social network. The app is based on research that shows a person’s happiness can be easily elevated by the network effect of happy people near you.

While the idea of sharing and recording personal happiness is interesting, these apps are problematic since they lead to counterfactual thinking. Happiness, like all emotions ebbs and flows. It can depend on any number of factors such as whom you were with, when you were there, and even the weather. Additionally, by tracking your happiness, it causes you to always be looking backward through rose-colored glasses rather than staying in the present.

As noted in a 1995 study, “When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists,” published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: "People's emotional responses to events are influenced by their thoughts about 'what might have been.' The authors extend these findings by documenting a familiar occasion in which those who are objectively better off nonetheless feel worse."

Apps like these drive us to compare ourselves and our emotional state with others, causing us to focus on what we don’t have rather than what we do have. It undermines our successes.

Interestingly, this applies across the board. Successful business leaders as well as Olympic winners even fall prey to this. For example, the same study found third place Olympic winners are sometimes even happier than second place because the "silver medals winners did upward comparisons to the gold medal winner, while the bronze medalists did downward comparisons to people who didn't win medals." And, this is evidence among business leaders in competitive fields as well. According to Jena McGregor’s Washington Post article, “The psychology of how Olympic gold, silver and bronze can go to your head,” “Leaders in competitive fields are always comparing themselves to those who came in first, when they might enjoy their success a little more if they learned to compare themselves to those who didn’t come close to winning at all."

This trend of tracking our emotional states leads us to focus backward rather than forward. To quote Daniel Gilbert, one of the creators of the Track Your Happiness Project, in his book, Stumbling on Happiness: “The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.” Happiness is a raw, human emotion—not something that can be tracked like calories and purchases.  Much like a mood ring one might find at a toy store, such apps shouldn’t be taken seriously. The very thought of it makes me sad.

How Busy is Too Busy?

Ok... I'm ironically delayed posting this (work, vacation and life in general may have interfered), but here is my Forbes article from July. It is focused on the trend of "being busy."
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It feels good to be busy. After all, it means that you are tackling tasks, making progress, moving forward. There is a sense of accomplishment that comes with being busy.

But the question arises how busy is too busy?

Theoretically you could work every waking second in the day and age of the mobile device. gyro’s @Work State of Mind report, conducted in conjunction with Forbes Insights, thoroughly examined the fact that work comes home and home comes to work. It’s just the way things are in today’s connected world.

Contrary to what we expected, many executives said this made them feel more empowered and agile. The minority of the 543 executives surveyed said they felt overwhelmingly negative about this “always on” life. In many ways, we’ve gotten used to the pace work and communication that didn’t exist less than a decade ago.

According to Tim Kruger’s recent New York Times post, “The Busy Trap,” excessive busyness is an emerging, yet central, value of American culture.” Kruger asserts that the very idea of busyness makes us feel important.  It gives us a sense of worth – defined through endless activity.”

As Kruger states: “Almost everyone I know is busy.  They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications.”

gyro and Forbes Insights found that 98% of executives work nights and weekends, 97% work on vacation and 53% will leave the dinner table to handle work if need be.

Some executives said they make better decisions at home because they had time to think. Others, just wanted to be kept in the loop in case a problem arose.

Either, there needs to time to relax, recharge and rebalance.  Without that necessary “down time,” our ability to innovate lessens. Playing as well as working is necessary. Through playing, we discover new ideas. Through resting, we take the time needed to approach problems from new angles.  The key to longer term success and ultimately, being content, appear to be finding the balance for yourself between being busy and taking the time to rejuvenate.

As noted in my earlier article, The Rise of Digital Detox, the constant flood of information can become overwhelming.  So much so, that unplugged vacation packages are surging in popularity and free apps are on the rise that actually block us from working,

As technology evolves so will we and the how much is too much debate will continue. As will the discussions about the new work life balance. All of these conversations will, well, continue to keep us busy as well.

The Emergence of Digital Secret Social Clubs

This is a repost of an article I wrote for my work blog in September on the rise of the secret social club in the digital space.
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The idea of the secret social club has been prevalent in the real world throughout much of history. However, until recently, this was not replicated in the digital space. In the last few years, status stories shared via social platforms and in real life have become increasingly more attractive and prevalent. Digital secret social clubs have begun to actively tap into these status stories. These clubs unify members not only through their exclusivity but also through shared passion points. They provide members a way to be on the inside, “in the know” about specific passions from food to art to travel. These clubs also give their members the outlet to be able to lead the way to the “unique,” the “cool,” and the avant-garde in their community.

The idea of the secret social club taps into some key emotional needs of consumers:

• The desire for unique stories to tell 
• The promise of “shared” experiences
• And, the feeling of increased social status.

As noted, in Trendwatching’s report, Statusphere: "When individuality is the new religion, owning or experiencing something no one else has is the ultimate status fix.” Secret social clubs are directly answering that need by providing participants stories that aren't common knowledge for the masses and helping consumers tell their own status-yielding stories to other consumers.

• Excursionist is a members-only travel site where travel is tailored to a consumer’s passions and around unique experiences. The trips are curated by world-renowned experts and guided by people in the local community.
• The Global Party is a worldwide extravaganza featuring luxury lifestyle brands and 80,000 of the world's elite inspired by the adventures of fictional character, Phileas Fogg. 80 exclusive parties will take place in venues across the globe all launching within 24 hours. This is based around an effort to raise funds and awareness for a collection of charities around the world.
• Diner en Blanc is an exclusive pop-up secret dining society. Members must dress in white to recognize each other and everyone brings his or her own food, tables, chairs and glassware to a secret but public location, which is revealed shortly before the start of event.

Secret social clubs allow brands to reward loyalty in a smart way. Brands can provide well thought out and unique incentives. For example, the Patron Social Club encourages consumer participation by promising the more a person participates the more likely he or she is to get an invite to one of the secret dining society events. This intrigues and engages consumers well beyond a simple offer or coupon.

The one of the strengths of these branded social clubs is that they share credible and original content that’s engaging and relevant to their target audience. They create compelling content their consumers actually want to consume. Moreover, these secret social clubs provide a holistic experience for their members by taking digital experience off-line into real life social engagements and then bringing the real life engagements back into the online experience. The branded secret social clubs have found clever ways to engage the social media audience to amplify an experience that already works well in the physical world.

Do I get points for that?

Lately, it seems like every time I'm on Twitter I see a post where a person states what he or she did for the day and then proceeded to award his or herself points: "I'm finally getting my office cleaned up. It is way past time that I get things organized. #dapts +200." Additionally, a number of mobile apps are springing up, allowing users to gain "points" for checking in to certain locations (a personal favorite for this is CauseWorld which allows you to collect and donate karma points to certain causes). I find these trends very interesting.

#Dapts or Daily Achievement points are all about scoring points for "doing what you do." So, what does that mean? According to the Daily Achievements site, you can give yourself or your friends points for "anything from eating a sandwich to winning an Olympic medal in curling." Um, okay. Cool. So, I can get whatever amount of points for whatever I feel like. That's appealing, but arbitrary. Oh, and you can "win badges by performing certain tasks. New badges are added all the time to give you ways to bug your terrible friends." Definitely an interesting concepts, but it doesn't seem like the same activity would be rated equally by all so the system appears to have some flaws. However, #Dapts have become increasing popular which leads to certain questions about what all of this means.

Have we become obsessed with scoring points for our daily activities? Does everything we do need to be scored? Are daily activities a contest? If so, how can these point scoring systems be used to change situations such as getting people to eat more fruits and vegetables for more points, to donate money to causes for more points, to generate more sales of certain products?

Here's some thoughts from a friend, Jordan Smith: "You'll earn 30 points for being a baby on the internet, but those points are worth far more than your self respect."

And, here's an awesome podcast from DICE 2010 by Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, diving into the idea of points-based gaming:

Oh, and I'm giving myself #dapts + 500 for writing this post ;)