2. Describe the Situation

In order to plan, you will need to set some goals. Perhaps you are eager to get on to that, because there are some goals that you already have in mind. However, people often make the mistake of setting impossible goals because their time is already fully allocated, or they don't have enough money, or they lack the skills necessary. Also, they tend to give little thought to how their current activities are currently contributing to their happiness (or not!) and to the happiness of other people whom their activities affect.

So, before you begin defining goals or setting policies, it is a good idea to take a look at your life as it is now, and give some thought to these things. You might also put some thought into predicting the situation in your future, to show expected outcomes if you continue on your current course.

If you are an adult, perhaps you already have some of these things recorded. You may have a budget, and you are keeping track of how you are spending your money. That's pretty important if you want to save for later stages in your life, and to keep your expenses under control. If you are married, so that both you and your wife are drawing on the same pot of money, it is even more important to do that planning together, so that you have agreement on how the money is to be spent. If you have this planned already, now is a good time to pull it out and review it.

Likewise, if you keep a calendar of your appointments, or a to-do list, this is a good time to pull out that too, review it, and bring it up-to-date.

Elements of Happiness

At this stage of the plan, it is also important to identify how satisfied you are with your life, and more specifically to identify what satisfactions and dissatisfactions you have in your life.

Also, this is the time to do the same for others who are in the scope of your plan, to the extent that you know. Perhaps you don't have a full understanding of other people, but you can note those satisfactions or dissatisfactions that you have detected.

For this stage of planning, it helps to consider the various motives that must be satisfied for the person to have happiness.

So, what is it that you need in order to be happy?

For an explanation of that, click this hyperlink to the Happiness topic on this site. For a very brief summary, happiness is attained by fulfilling motives in these categories:

Physical Needs
Social Needs
Security Needs
Intellectual Desires
Artistic Desires
Empathic Satisfaction
Spiritual Motives

If you use the Pathways tool, you will not only classify your outcomes as desirable or undesirable, you will indicate which motivators are affected and to what extent (using the some colour-coded ratings). In other words, you will indicate why the outcome has the satisfactions and dissatisfactions that it has. This serves as a systematic way of evaluating your life, and of identifying joys and problems in other people in your plan whom you care about.

At this stage it can also be useful to measure wellbeing for yourself or the group you are planning for. This can be complex, but it's worth doing if you have a difficult problem to solve, with various alternatives that may yield different levels of success. (In subsequent steps, you will identify alternatives, and compare them against the status quo.)

Here is simple example of "outcomes" shown on the Pathways planning grid:

Illustration of window in the Pathways app

Like other planning tools, Pathways has a means of setting budgets, tracking expenditures, and scheduling your time. With Pathways, the money and time are linked to the "outcomes" in the plan. The details are not shown here, but if you choose to use this tool, you will find the instructions in an online tutorial and in the online help.

What is uniqe with the Pathways tool is the ability to record satisfaction, tentative outcomes, and barriers. In the above illustration, there are "traffic light" symbols that represent satisfaction from the outcome. A "green" traffic light is a desirable outcome (and double-green for much joy!). "Red" identifies an undesirable outcome (and double-red represents misery!). "Yellow" is mildly undesirable, and "Blue" is mildly desirable. Any given outcome can be a mix of these. For example, many desirable things involve some work that can be a bit of a drag, so it is commonplace for an outcome to have a mix of green and yellow.

If you go to the trouble of rating all the outcomes that take up your time, Pathways will produce a "motivational fulfilment" report for you, to list the joys and miseries, and to show you what is missing in your life.

You don't have to use software to track this, but it does give you a systematic way of considering it. Alternately you could make notes on a sheet of paper. The important thing is to give some thought to what joys you have in your life now, what things are problems now (or likely to become problems), and what is missing in your life.

Likewise you can note this for other people whom you care about, such as family members. Often you won't have the full picture, but you can rate what you notice. If your young son or daughter appears to be lonely, or bored, or fearful, you note that in the "current situation." That way you won't forget to address it as you proceed with the next planning steps.

Also, if you have included pets in your plan, keep in mind that animals' motives are simpler. What might be a "lack of fulfilment" for a human may not be a problem for your pet. But animals do have many of the same motives, and for those you need to consider if the animal is in a state of satisfaction or distress.

Remember that the greatest happiness is not achieved solely by attending to personal satisfiers, but by spreading happiness, and by gaining vicarious joy from doing that. That is why Empathic Motives are very important to include in your list of satisfiers - so you won't forget about that!

Some tips: Outcomes to Include

When recording the "current situation" in your plan, for yourself and all people in the scope of your plan, and for the time period that you are planning for, here are some things to include:

Include any regularly scheduled activity that takes up time. This is necessary so that you can evaluate how the time and money are being used. An obvious example that applies to everyone is "eating and sleeping", which will likely take 8 hours of each day for sleep and 3 hours for meals. Another obvious item to include is work (if the person is employed) or study (if the person is a student) After accounting for those, how much time each week do you have remaining, for yourself, and for the others who are planning with you?

Include responsibilities. The simplest world would be one in which each person was responsible only for his (or her) own needs, but in the real world there are children who need someone to care for them, people who have suffered from natural disasters who need help, people in need of medical help, etc. We all hope to have some essential level of protection so that we can get help when we need it. If a society can provide that guarantee, it is only because people are assigned to fulfil the needs for those situations. To accomplish that, the various roles that need to be fulfilled are allocated to people according to rules of responsibility. So, if the participants in your plan have particular responsibilities, it is important to identify them within your plan. It will be a high priority to continue those activities as compared to discretionary ones.

Your Surplus

Now it is time to calculate your surplus. How much spare time and money do you have? For others who are planning with you, how much spare time do they have? If you used Pathways for this phase of planning, you can run reports to calculate that for you.

Also, this is the time to compare the time spent on responsibilities as compared to discretionary activities. Maybe some of that "discretionary time" could be reallocated to something that gives more personal satisfaction, or that gives you vicarious satisfaction by helping others. If you are planning in consultation with others, such as family members, the others can also make those judgements for their own time.

Sometimes you might spot ways of reallocating time to increase the benefits. For example, suppose you notice that you are spending a lot of time watching TV, or playing video games. One very minor alteration to that plan is to spend the time watching TV or playing with someone else, by inviting someone, so that will add to your friendship as well as the enjoyment of the show or game itself. Another slightly bigger alteration would be to invite your friend(s) to a recreational or sporting activity, so that you can simultaneously get the enjoyment of a game, friendship, and physical fitness. Your own friends might help you with that. Moreover, you can look over your findings on who is in need of friendship or exercise as candidates to do those things with.

Now you are in a good position to look at what is missing in your life, what is missing in the lives of others you are planning with, plus observable needs of others who are listed in the plan (but who are not actively planning with you). This is the foundation for the next step, which is to "make some wishes"...

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