Had a good day?

When you get home at night your partner will probably greet you with a ‘Hello, have you had a good day?’ and, no doubt, without thinking you’ll reply with ‘Yes thanks, how about you?’, a short greeting which fills the gap between entering the house and engaging in further conversation.  I think it’s called phatic, speech used to express or create an atmosphere of shared feelings rather than to impart information.

But have you had a good day?  How do you know and do you have a way of measuring, some metrics in place, to know how good or bad your day has been?

Everyone naturally has a different perception of what is good or bad and so there is no one set of standard answers to these questions.  If you are under threat at work, then a day when you have managed to avoid your boss may be considered to be good.  If you have been suffering from a long term illness, a small improvement in how you feel may have made it a good day for you overall.  If you are under a lot of pressure, with many conflicting demands, it might seem that nothing you do can get you out of the mire and so every day seems like a bad one.

So what can you do?  A colleague of mine, a long time ago, gave me an insight into how they assessed how good a day that they had had and I have been using it ever since.  It was ther coping mechanism and, as with all good processes it is very simple.  Basically, when you wake up in the morning, when you carry out your ablutions, you set yourself a small number of things that you want to achieve that day, I use the number three.  The tasks should be a mixture of things, some taxing, some rewarding and some that are easily achieved,  a mix that will stretch you during the day but won’t kill you or demotivate you by doing them.  So solving world hunger shouldn’t be on your list but neither should be breathing in and out.

Once you’ve got your list, set off on your day’s activities and aim to tick the things off as you go along.  No matter what else happens (with some obvious exceptions), a good day is when you achieve all of the things you set out to do and a bad day is when you don’t tick any of them off at all.  In between, I guess, is an OK day.  You may think you have had a nightmare of a day with things going wrong left right and centre but you could still end up having had a good day in the end.

So today I set myself three things to achieve, firstly to complete a report due for tomorrow (quite time consuming and taxing), secondly to ring a difficult customer with a view to arranging a meeting and agreeing what we had to cover and, thirdly to get an eye test in my diary as I’m finding it harder and harder to see.  And now as I am writing this, the report is finished, I’ve agreed with my customer how we are going to proceed and I have my eye test booked.

‘Thanks for asking, yes, I’ve had a good day.’