Time really flies! It has been more than three months since the official release of this challenge. At the time of the release, I have already had a Google Sheets prototype of a game to help myself figure out what gamification should be like. That prototype was called “Gamechanger”..
“Gamechanger”: a bar set too high
“Gamechanger” was a game where you play the role of a character and go through different stories, gaining useful items, social connections and skills on the way. The aim is to make the character a successful person, measured by the “Satisfaction” metric, which is influenced by various factors such as wealth, health and quality of relationships. However, all these had a catch: a player needed to complete tasks in real life, track the time spent on doing them, and use formulas to calculate into “Offering Points” which can be offered to Gamechanger in order to exchange for a certain amount of time that can be spent playing it.
The creation of this game was a fulfilling process. Gamechanger was my attempt at imitating how a role playing game would be like without actual graphics and game engines and very complicated code. It was pretty hard to create something fun without the proper software: I had to think hard about how to create timers, how the scores should be updated, and what kind of design I would need to make the game interface as clean and functional as possible.
However, the method of progression in this game, updating of the stories and transferring of the content from one spreadsheet to another was too much of a hassle, so I discontinued work on this prototype. Although it left me wondering whether I could have started on something simpler, I managed to learn how to create cool things such as countdown timers and stopwatch going by the minute, progress bars and graphs with a tracker point that can display your progress at any point of time.
“Commitment Tracker”: the master planner and schedule
The Commitment Tracker appeared in the later stages of my work on Gamechanger. It gave legitimacy to the concept of Gamechanger as a game to incentivise productive work.
I started creating the commitment tracker while I was hospitalised for severe heat exhaustion. The original idea was to organise everything that I was doing into specific commitments, then try to fit all of them on schedules that repeat themselves after a certain frequency of time (which I call “cycles”). This would help me to balance how I spend time on all of them, as well as to better track the amount of time I spend on each of them.
I first input the commitments within a column and the dates go on a single row. Within the space governed by both axes, I shaded each box corresponding to the date and a certain commitment according to its completion status. The shaded boxes would act like plots on a graph, charting out what I have been up to during a certain period of time. This design was inspired by the idea of the duty rosters for cleaners we see displayed in some public toilets, where there is a rotation between different cleaners for cleaning a toilet. When cleaned, the duty cleaner would sign on the roster, and it can be audited by someone else to certify that the cleanliness of the toilet had been checked.
To help me manage the commitments better, I categorised the commitments and added a filter to find the commitment that is to be updated more quickly.
In order to help me better prioritise my tasks and feel better about my progress, I started assigning multipliers to commitments to define the value of doing them. The multipliers would multiply the duration of time I spent on different commitments to derive a score, which I named Offering Points (OP). Why name it as such? It was to reinforce my purpose of doing all the tracking, which was to keep a tab on any kind of contribution I made to improving and preparing myself for future challenges. The multipliers, in addition to the cycles gave structure to how I should sequence my commitments when I schedule them on my calendar.
After spending some time using the first design of the tracker, it became harder to locate and make modifications to individual squares on the graph. Also, I wanted to be able to include more information about a commitment to provide more content for feedback on how to improve upon how much I gain from each commitment. Instead of a graphical representation, I put all the information into a list view resembling a computer database.
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| By the way, MOAT stands for "Mother of all tasks", which originally took the form of a large, messy checklist that contained all of my to-dos on Google Keep. |
“Motivation System”: the place for my breaks and rewards
Then finally, the motivation system. The reason for my creating of this system was in response to the question of what to do with the OPs when the chances of Gamechanger being operational became more and more unlikely. The Motivation System was a place for me to track the OPs I have earned and spent, which was mostly to exchange them for rewards I developed for myself. They can be things I already enjoy consuming such as anime shows, or games that I create.
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| This system once had a space for tracking the number of points earned on a daily basis, a place for exchanging points for rewards, and some room for the administration of penalties. Now it has become a pretty messy place, and I am trying my best to find out how to simplify its functions. |
Soon, I added more features that I felt would keep me motivated in my doing of my commitments. I had analytics tracking changes in my OP and how much time I spent on each commitment. I had penalties for procrastinating and missing deadlines, while coming up with remediation plans to tackle these problems. I even had a shop which sells virtual rewards, a game that can potentially replace Gamechanger, and a place for self-help whenever I am feeling low, and it helps support me by reducing stress and helping me see the uplifting, positive sides of life.
Eventually, I dropped some of these features because I found out that they were of little use to me and some even started to overlap with the Commitment Tracker. To remedy this, along with the many other problems I found in the rest of my productivity systems: Calendar, Google Keep, Habitica and Commitment Tracker, I had a really long reviewing of systems which took me the last few weeks of year 2020 and the first two weeks of year 2021 for me to finish.
I did away with the penalties and remediation plans because they made me dwell on my failures and caused an aversion to going back on doing the commitments because I did not want to spend so much time thinking about my failures every time I use these features when I knew that having these problems were inevitable. It would be better if I could just reflect on myself and not penalise myself so much, otherwise I would just get more disheartened and avoid trying again.
All these systems work together to form my personal productivity system
If you think what I had described was too complicated, I have created a presentation to summarise what all these mean to me and my productivity:
What I learnt from trying to master time
One: Starting small brings better outcomes
My plans were initially really ambitious when I started out completing this challenge. I wanted to build a game from stretch using simple code. I aimed for a system that could track anything meaningful I did efficiently. I desired for a mechanism that could help me balance out my commitments, my breaks and my rewards. As such, the duration I spent on this was overstretched, and the process of gamifying what I want to do evolved faster than I could keep track. Large investments of time are often risky. And when faced with much uncertainty about what I should do, it is much better to set manageable targets which would enable me to be adaptable, because if one failed, I could easily work on something else right away.
Two: Coming back to my purpose can expedite my work in this challenge
Creating a game has been more exciting than I had thought, so there were months where I was too carried away with exploring new concepts and building new features that everything became messy. By reminding myself of what the systems I designed were for, and to include more reviews while I tried out and created the systems. It was to this end that I put Gamechanger to a stop and focused more on the tasks tracking and rewards tracking.
Three: Gamifying my tasks provides the good mix of creativity and data that would help me to improve more rapidly
Designing gamified systems gave me the opportunity to think of stories and objectives that give greater meaning to what I am doing. It also allowed me to see how I am spending my time. Just the awareness of where my time went alone had a lot of effect on my deliberately cutting down on anime consumption, as I knew that I needed to clear more tasks before the reward would be able to serve its purpose of feeling good from having accomplished something. I also thought a lot about motivation, and what kept people coming back to games. At the most basic level, people would be motivated to do something that fulfils their needs. For most games, it would be the need to unwind and escape from the stresses of daily lives, and find a channel to express one’s creativity and to socialise with others. This meant that the success of my systems would be defined by the meeting of my needs - having a body of data to help me make better decisions and habits in time management.
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