Happiness and the In-box

As much I liked the book The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, I think the author missed at least one key "how".  The "hows" described in the book tended to be behaviors that are easily tested, such as testing the effects of meditation or writing in a gratitude journal.  They involved a simple activity that you could ask a bunch of people to do and then compare them to a control group that doesn't do the activity.

One "how" that I feel the author missed is the "how" of a good time management system, such as the system described in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity that I've written about many times before.  I'm convinced that this system has made me much happier in the last few months by helping me process my "in-boxes" (paper, electronic, and even commitments made in a meeting or over the phone), so that the in-boxes become empty.  The actions implied by all that input, instead of hiding in a huge batch of e-mail messages, are now organized into plans that I address much more efficiently than I have in the past.  This leaves me feeling more in control.  I'm more confident that there isn't something important I should be doing but can't remember.  I think people who depend on me feel more confident that they CAN depend on me.  And I feel as if I'm better able to align my actions with the things I really value.  This type of time management system may not appear in the "How of Happiness" book, or similar books such as Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment because implementing a time management system is such a complex effort, that it isn't easy to test one group of people versus a control group that didn't implement the system.