Happiness Project Toolbox

About Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin had the idea to start a happiness project one rainy afternoon, when she was staring out the window of a city bus. "What do I want from life, anyway?" she asked herself. "Well...I want to be happy." But she never thought about what made her happy, or how she might be happier.

In that moment, she realized two things: she wasn't as happy as she could be, and her life wasn't going to change unless she made it change. "I need to think about this. In fact," she reflected, "I should start a happiness project." She started to work on her happiness project the next day.

She went on to write The Happiness Project, an account of the year she spent testing the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific research, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happier. (Harper, January 2010)

The Happiness Project Toolbox grew out of her discovery that certain tools she'd developed were especially helpful in boosting her happiness. She created this site to make these tools easily available to everyone.

Gretchen Rubin also writes about happiness on her popular daily blog, The Happiness Project, which is also a blog on Slate. It ranks in the prestigious Technorati "Top 5K" and is cross-posted on The Huffington Post. You can sign up for her free monthly newsletter highlighting the best of the previous month's posts.

Gretchen Rubin is the author of several other books, including the bestselling Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, Forty Ways to Look at JFK, Profane Waste (with photographs by Dana Hoey) and Power Money Fame Sex: A User's Guide. She also has three terrible novels locked in a desk drawer.

She has talked to Matt Lauer on Today and to Brian Lamb on Booknotes, been profiled in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," and done radio shows from the Talk of the Nation to the Leonard Lopate Show to Voice of America to the Playboy Channel.

Gretchen Rubin started her career in law, and she was clerking for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor when she realized she really wanted to be a writer. Raised in Kansas City, a graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, she lives in New York City with her husband and two young daughters.

Her only hobbies are reading and writing—and helping other people clean out their closets. She's left-handed, red-haired, terrible at sports, a constant hair-twister, and afraid to drive.

You can follow her on Twitter as gretchenrubin.