Can a Smile Help Me Working Smarter in 2014?

I love my regular e-mails from LinkedIn, I don't always make time to read them - I at least glance but rarely internalize.  Tonight I was catching up on e-mails and the headline "60+ Ways to Work Smarter" and I thought to myself this is what I need!

So I scrolled through the headlines in this e-mail (it only showed 7 of the 60 which is probably all that I can handle at once) and a woman named Naomi Simson had the tagline 'The Happy Hack' - I like being happy so that was the first one I needed to take a gander at... plus it sounds DIFFERENT from any other productivity tip I've seen in the past so I HAD to check it out - and I'm glad I did!

Many of the articles that I read about how to be more productive or better manage my time are full of great ideas but they often times feel so intangible, leaving me to think that's cool but where do I start?  I've made some little changes here and there, trying to not jump to read every e-mail as it comes in, focusing on what I'm working on for set times and also scheduling times to reflect... but these are all things that I struggle with then wonder if they even work or if I'm just fooling myself.

Now this "happy hack" is an interesting angle... there were two lines in the article that really stood out

"Happy people are creative, productive people."

and

"Be happy then you will be able to apply lots of Hacks!" 

This has me thinking - maybe I've been going through these productivity tricks in the past with the wrong attitude.  It would be great to figure out how to manage my time better or whatever so that I can be more relaxed and therefore happier... but what I'm thinking NOW is that I need to start off with a happy and positive attitude and THEN apply these different hacks.

At the end of the day, I make the choice to be happy or not - no one else makes that for me.  We all know it isn't easy - there are tons of things that go on day to day that add stress and wears me down, but maybe those folks were on to something with all those quotes about how your attitude is one of the few things you can actually control!  So tonight the new attitude begins and we're going to see how much this can positively influence my day to day.

Happiness starts now... and with that attitude I may actually explore some of these other 59 hacks to see how I can get more out of my days!

If you're interested in reading, here's 'The Happy Hack':  http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140121000342-1291685-productivity-hacks-happy-people-are-productive-people?trk=eml-mktg-inf-m-productivity-0121-p5