Values in the daily life: Dissecting the everyday life

The meaning of the word analysis is to look at the elements of something, find out how they go or can go together, and to what ends. Take a mechanic, he may deconstruct an engine piece by piece in order to understand it and ultimately to repair or improve a truck or a car.

Similarly, everyday life can be deconstructed into the tiniest daily moments.

Your days could be like in the chart below, centering on how your well-being evolves, rises and decreases, throughout a day.

The vertical axis represents how well you are doing on a scale from one to ten, while the horizontal axis represents the series of daily moments.

What are those peaks there in the chart you might wonder?

The first one from the left could be that first lovely cup of coffee in the morning before rushing off somewhere. But what are the other peaks throughout this day about?

Generally, times and moments that may be valued throughout any day could be when you do something that you are interested in, or when there is affiliation with others, or it could be when you feel pride in your work.

Every single day, there are many of these small events. Many of them are similar and some researchers sometimes seek to capture the effects of these look alike moments, it seems, using measures such as autonomy, growth and relatedness.

Perhaps especially autonomy and relatedness are the most strongly related to how well people are doing throughout a day.

In one study, when participants rated how much they appreciated a range of different leisure time activities, the results showed that different kinds of affiliation with others consistently came up on top.

And other studies have clearly shown that autonomy and being somewhat intrinsically motivated wields a strong influence on how people are doing.

Here’s the chart:

Then again, what are those peaks in this chart?

Aside from that first lovely cup of coffee, and the second one, affiliation and intrinsically motivated activities are strong candidates for these moments.

Affiliation is the coffee breaks with colleagues, it could be talking to and spending time with customers, clients or students, and it is the times with family and spouses.

The intrinsically motivated activities on the other hand could be the times when you are free to choose and spend time on something that you are at least a little bit intrigued about; maybe when you have the chance to choose which project to work on, which colleague to work with, perhaps which toolset to use, what day to do it, and so on.

And it all happens in this everyday series of moments.

Then what would happen if you were able to increase autonomy a bit, so that throughout the day you are able to spend another two 15 minute units of time with something that you are a little bit intrigued about.

And what if you would also increase affiliation a bit, meeting your sister at the gym before work, and carving out some time with the spouse in the afternoon.

Then in that chart above, the peaks would be somewhat more frequent, some would be slightly higher, and some of the lows would be slightly higher also.

So the takeaway is to consider whether it is possible to up the intrinsically motivated activities as well as the affiliation, and let decision-making reflect the possible changes in this daily series of moments.

Source/further reading:

• Reis, Sheldon, Gable, Roscoe and Ryan, 2000. Daily well-being: The role of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Personality and social psychology bulletin.
• Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz and Stone, 2004. A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method. Science. (measurements of activities throughout the day, working and commuting lowest rated; highest rated intimate relations, socializing and relaxing)