I wrote a little while back about how much I’d enjoyed a book calledThe Now Habit. It helped me with the stress I’d been feeling about getting things done.
One of the strategies I took away from the book was not looking at projects through the lens of “OhmyGod, I havetodothisallrightnow!”, but just approaching work in small increments. “Always be starting,” is the thinking.
I implemented this using something called The Pomodoro Technique: setting a timer and working for 25-minute intervals. Each completed 25-minute dash got me a star, and for a few months I kept track of those stars.
But what then?
Jane McGonigal is a game designer who contends that we achieve much more through play than we do through work, and that fun is the best way to change behaviour. Games, she says, give us all kinds of clear-cut rewards that real life often doesn’t.
As a self-employed person, I sometimes wrestle with getting started and feeling a sense of accomplishment about what it’s all for, because as much as I get done, there’s more to do. Of course, this is great news, having a gig like that, and I’m grateful. And the people I work with are an utter dream; I could not ask for cleverer, more encouraging compatriots. But the work never gets done, and working in my little bubble, I don’t often get chances to celebrate or, as McGonigal would put it, to win.
So I made up this game.
I was inspired by a boardgame idea in Keri Smith‘s Living Out Loud. Her books are wonderful encouragers of creativity and freedom, like an open window on a hot summer night. (He says, remembering when he lived in a place where summer nights were hot.) It took me a while to figure out how my game would operate, but I did it, I’ve been running it for two weeks, and it works!
Here it is:
And here are the rules:
1) Each domain of activity has its own piece. (Like “Books”, “Work”, “Organisation”, “Shorthand”, “Fitness”, “Make Do and Mend”, that sort of thing.)
2) In the daytimer I made, I outline my week.
On a little pad, I set up the things I want to work on for the week and stick that sheet into my daytimer.
For every 25-minute block of activity I do in that domain, I get a star, which I keep track of on a little tag for that day.
3) At the end of the day (or whenever I get around to reviewing my tags), I move my pieces forward by the number of stars I’ve collected.
4) Every ten places, there’s an orange dot. When I pass one of these, I get to flick the spinner.
One of two things will happen on a spin: I draw a card, or I get money to put into “the lottery”.
There are two types of card on the spinner:
Challenge cards. These require me to do something difficult, to set up a short-term “sprint” goal, or to articulate a big goal for that domain.
Reward cards. These cards feature payoffs that I might otherwise forget to give myself — like pampery stuff, or, for instance, today when I finished my work, I got to go for a walk just for the hell of it. (I explored a hundreds-of-years-old cemetery in town I’d been meaning to walk through.)
The card might direct me to make an entry in my Book of Wins — writing down what I’ve achieved instead of just letting it evaporate off into the aether.
Money. If the spinner lands on a money space, that amount gets put into the lottery — kind of like an escrow account.
Every time I pass one of the green jelly-bean-shaped spaces on the board, I get to spin on this spinner:
Depending on how that turns out, the money either carries forward, or I get to take it as a treat. (I have a separate real bank account called “Mojo Money” which is just for gifts, trips, and fun, and this comes from that. So far, I don’t think the amount from the game would ever exceed what I allocate to that account.)
This weekend, I got to buy myself a guilt-free bunch of bookbinding schwag with what I won from last week’s activities.
4) Levelling up. Every hundred spaces, I “level up”. In other words, I acknowledge the progress I’ve made in that domain, make an entry in the Book of Wins, and I can consider myself to be “one better” in doing that thing.
~
Okay, this probably seems utterly nuts to anyone who lives outside my head. But it’s working for me… In the kind of way where “working” means “fun”, which is what I’m trying to make this all about.