If you don’t plan for time for yourself, to meditate, play, and create, you won’t get that time and at the end of the day you'll wonder where the time went and why you're exhausted. If you don’t learn how to delegate, you’ll always be playing the martyr in your home. If you don’t insist on going to bed and getting eight hours of sleep each night, you’ll pay for it in your energy level the next day.
That’s why my sister and I wrote the Happiness File. We are both fun-loving, creative people and when we figured out how to get our homes organized, we discovered more free time to figure out other ways to use the 3x5 card file system we created.
“The Sidetracked Sister’s Happiness File” was published in 1985. It was a labor of love. "Sidetracked Home Executives: from pigpen to paradise" was a best-seller and women were getting their homes organized all over the country. With its success, our publisher was hounding us to write about organizing other things besides when to fix dinner, scrub the toilet and make the bed. We chose being happy and having fun. I said to our editor, “If the 3x5 cards can organize a household, it can organize fun too.”
We were all meant to be happy and peaceful. More and more evidence continues to impress our Western school of psychology pointing to the notion that we are basically good and when that goodness is cultivated humans grow to be compassionate, peaceful and happy beings.
Writing a book about how to be happy wasn’t easy and peaceful as one might think. But we had to write anyway. In fact over the five years it took to complete the book, at times we felt like we were underwater and our writing reflected our circumstances (that’s why it took five years to write it).