The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

by Gretchen Rubin

At a bare minimum, you can remember birthdays. I’ve never been good at remembering friends’ birthdays—or, to be more accurate, I never remembered any friend’s birthday (except one friend whose birthday falls the day after mine). Sending out birthday e-mails would ensure that I was in touch with my friends at least once a year. That sounded meager, but the fact is, it would be a vast improvement in many cases. Many of my friends were on Facebook, which tracks birthdays, but many weren’t, so I had to send out a bunch of e-mails to ask for birthdays. While I was at it, I decided to update my entire address book and copy the information onto my computer. For years, I’d been adding and crossing out entries in the pages of my Filofax, which were now practically illegible and dangerously irreplaceable.

One big change since I wrote this book? Social media and technology, especially smartphones. With friendships, certainly, and with so many other parts of our lives, technology is playing a complex role. In some ways it's terrific, in some ways, terrible. I remind myself, "Technology is a good servant but a bad master," and that I need to be in control of technology instead of letting it take control of me, my time, my energy, and my focus. Easier said than done! In writing about habits for BETTER THAN BEFORE, I was struck how many people wanted to change habits related to technology -- everything from using it to remember birthdays (my resolution here) to stopping themselves from texting while driving (yipes). True confession: I'm not very good about remembering birthdays. This is not one of my more successful resolutions.