When you’re working from home, it’s easy to lose direction of your personal goals, tasks and chores. I had a similar problem; so, as a distraction I just started cleaning my space. Then it occurred to me, “Why don’t I do that with my life as well?” I’ve been making Kanban boards for a while now; I can apply the same principles to my life, check off tasks that I had been skipping out on, and get my life and my goals in focus.
So, I did.
And… then a week passed. Where’s the progress of the board though? Turns out I’m still at step 1. I often forgot to log entries in the board, to move the cards around, heck, even opening the board in the first place seemed too troublesome.
If you’re like me, you may not feel the sense of urgency to do any task at hand that you assign yourself, because it lacks enough motivation. I know moving cards around and adding tasks to a Kanban board is very effective to streamline your goals and tasks, but if you don’t have the motivation for it, it is a moot point.
What kind of motivation though? Intrinsic, of course, which brought me to my epiphany: Gamify your life.
It’s not easy to gamify your life though. Think about it, if you give yourself a trophy for everything you achieve, it kills the intrinsic nature of the motivation, makes it extrinsic, ultimately killing your drive to get the trophy.
My gamer senses were tingling though, so I took to research. I came across a couple game elements that you could add to your life to make it more fruitful, and more action oriented.
Habitica does the job well of entering the tasks and providing you with a customizable database of tasks you can interact with in a gamified manner, such as, it has points, badges, collectibles, and even reminders on your phone for adding or checking off your tasks.
Though in this case, the problem is to getting to check off the tasks or adding the tasks in the first place, so let’s borrow a page from Jakob Nielsen himself, and put to principle two usability heuristics:
1. Recognition is better than recall
2. Visibility of system status
Your gamified elements should be in a place which is visibly accessible to you every day; whether it’s your laptop, your desk, your surroundings or even next to your bed (for me, it’s my personal Kanban board on trello). If you can see it, you are reminded of it, and thus you may get the motivation to fill it or check it off. Also, visibility of system status will remind you to make the task’s progress visible as well: you should know what is hindering you from completing the task further and you should know the triggers that are helping you in succeeding.
Deep Patel writes, “Try assigning a point for each dish washed, or 5 points for each page completed for a report or for each email sent. Time yourself going through the grocery store -- can you beat your old record?” Being a gamer, I know that the joy of beating your previous score is a great motivator, so is timed interactions. Deadlines might not work, so jazzing it up by adding the self-competition factor to the task may help. An example of this could be working out, can you beat your previous run time? That’s an easy one though, you can use this tactic to spice up tasks you might find relatively boring or challenging.
Once you are able to recognise what is helping you succeed and how, it should be relatively easier to successfully accomplish your goals.
Some gamified elements that I found helpful include:
1. Timing recurrent tasks and adding experience points to achieving a better time goal
2. Using brighter colours for categories of tasks to help grab attention of them
3. Using alarms to get attention of critical tasks by deadline (Trello helps a bunch in this case if your email notifications are on, it will email you every single time you may be approaching or skipping a deadline)
4. Extrinsic motivation i.e. physical rewards for unpleasant/challenging tasks (such as working out in my case)
5. Sharing your success in achieving milestones with your peers/friends to add a social interaction value of “fun”
6. Making note of triggers or activities that help you get in a flow
And many more.
Some fun applications you can use to gamify your life include, Habitica, Level Up Life and LifeUp. Gamification is a great tool for aligning your behaviour in a positive manner and besides applying it to your business, you can apply it to your life and see the rewards for yourself.
Sources:
I have included a PDF of “Prototyping a gamification layer on Trello, a Kanban based online project management system”, a study by Denitsa Todorova, Nima Zargham and Arun Geo John, which might help you in gamifying your own Kanban board:
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