Need A Resolution?

Do you make your bed every morning?   Do you feel productive in your daily activties?  Do you stick to a budget?  Do you generally experience happiness?  I wish that I had a good way to track your answers.  Maybe I should set up some polls on my blog.  Now why would I ask these odd questions? Well they might be appropriate for one of the first blogs of the year.  In a recent article in Readers Digest, a Jackie Ashton examined the relationship of these questions.  She commented about Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit in which Duhigg claims that making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity and stronger skills at sticking to a budget.  It also boosts happiness.  Now can an act that takes about three minutes actually make that much of a difference in your life?  Apparently making your bed and other feel-good tasks, like exercising and cooking your own food, are considered to be "keystone habits", routines that spill over to others and are catalysts for other good behaviors.  Interesting.  I really don't remember if I made my own bed at home when I was growing up - I probably had to.  I do know that we had bunk beds and they were hard to make.  In college I did make my bed.  Fortunately, my roommate for two of those years was very neat and, unlike most college students, we prided ourselves in keeping a neat, clean room.  I guess for most of my working years, my wife took care of the bed making because I generally left early in the morning for work.  But since I am retired, whoever gets there first makes the bed and sometimes we do it together.  Now I have always stuck to a budget but probably because it was the only way to get by on a low income and not because of making my bed.  Productive? - probably yes, but because that is my personality.  Happiness? - generally yes, but not because I make my bed.  Although part of my happiness in life is being able to crawl into a nicely made, comfortable bed each evening.  So does this "research" and these conclusions make any sense?  I don't know, but if you need a good New Year's resolution, why not try making your bed each morning.  Let me know how it goes.