The Routines Challenge: Conclusion

Challenge 5: The Routines Challenge

I owe myself an apology for vanishing from my blog for a good while now, with very little updates to the progress of the challenges. Now, I can see better why my blog’s viewer count has not increased at all and why there are no loyal site visitors - it is because I am not faithfully updating my blog regularly myself. This needs to change if I want to turn my blog into an exciting, living space from a mediocre personal diary. Such a desire was also the basis for one of the reasons why I decided to set up this Routines Challenge, which is to add more routine into my life to create more positive experiences and make out things I can look forward to.

Having painted a bleak picture of my Routines Challenge, not all is lost. I found that I had a sense of responsibility to complete all the tasks that I planned out. Even though I did not give my best effort every day of the Challenge, as there were days I forgot about it, it is staying committed that counts. Before this Challenge, I thought that it would be because there was something wrong with my willpower or my motivations for starting a task when I ended a day completing far fewer tasks than I envisaged. Going through this Challenge woke me up to the fact that none of these reasons mattered. By giving myself enough time, I would be able to do everything. Instead of focusing on whether I am up to a task, I should be asking myself when I could find the time to have it done.

Therefore, the part of this Challenge that crumbled had nothing to do with the completion of tasks. What I failed to achieve was the systems that were designed to spice things up so as to keep me motivated and coming back to the Challenge. I wanted the gamification to work so badly that I lost myself in the writing of the rules for such systems. The work eventually expanded into something that I would not be able to manage within the tens of days specified in this Challenge. I am republishing my Rulebook so that anyone can see how complicated the rules ended up to be (it is still under the same old link as the previous post: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQidqH1KYebjyJcRFHsRaL2tYXjtjG0c3m7YRml1UThOnTt9GMq83EZFZVf6gKJEjSstARdtCjZcctK/pub). After this Challenge, I will do well by considering design elements (such as colours and how I allocate my time) as the main source of system for future task management systems, instead of trying to create a value for my work out of nothing through spinning out new systems and games in exchange for productive work.

Here is a list of what I have done in this Challenge, plus the lessons I learnt in the process:

• I split the Challenge up into six Periods of 10 days. This allowed me to review my progress periodically and make adjustments to the Challenge rules so that I can better support my behavioural change to enable me to spend more time on productive work.
• I listed out the tasks and the routines beforehand which gives me a clear structure of what I can do. Being able to choose the tasks was empowering and made it easier to stay committed to the routines. However, one shortcoming of this system is that it is not time-bound and I lack measures to ensure that I balance out my time with all the different tasks
• I came up with different levels of difficulty of the Challenge which reward various amounts of points proportionately. It failed to make the Challenge more exciting through strategy-building. This may be due to the lack of distinction in the value of higher amounts of points, so there was little meaning in exploring different difficulty levels
• I extended this differentiation in difficulty levels to the Routine Goals, which were the main part of the Challenge. When I start to actually attempt the Challenge, I rarely touched the higher-level difficulties because they were too time consuming and there was no enforcement of going to higher difficulties. In many video games (especially those based on dungeons), attempting higher-level difficulties was mainly for better quality loot and to improve a player’s reputation. In a solitary Challenge, I need to review my motivations as they are not the same as that of video games
• I categorised the goals into Duration Goals, Commitment Goals and Task Goals. There were loopholes in the Task Goals because the completion of tasks were poorly defined. I could bend the rules and set the task completion goal as the duration committed to doing the task and every task could become completed that way. However, it is not realistic to aim for completion for every single task because some tasks like writing blog posts take a longer time to finish.
• The Bonus Points system gave me some additional objectives to look out for in the Challenge. However, they were not enticing in the long run especially when the only reward for them is additional points.
• As for the benefits systems, I failed miserably in coming up with suitable amenities to spend my points on. Their development became increasingly complicated and tedious, with no end in sight. However, as I believe they are key to giving me a greater sense of purpose in my tasks, I will continue to develop them after the Routines Challenge and integrate them into the Challenge’s successor, my Productivity System 2.0.
• The penalties were insufficient and poorly enforced. I cannot be basing everything on differences in points because numerical values do not mean much to me. To improve on that, I can consider adapting penalty games and forfeits to make the penalties more intimidating.
• The Gold currency helped to make the tracking easier since there were too many things that could influence the points. It helped to act as a bridge between points and the usage of benefits and amenities. Basing the amount of Gold I get each day on the amount of points I have is an interesting concept for a currency, giving me more options to develop future productivity systems.
• I had a very elaborate tracker that keeps tabs of all changes in points but it is just messy and hard to navigate around with everything put together. I should consider splitting the different sections up and only display the relevant values (without the calculations) so that the tracking is easier.
  
  

  

  The tracker is absurd because of its monstrous size. It looks more like a database than a tracker. If not for the colour coding, I would have gone crazy from updating this.

  
  
• I recorded down all the rules needed to run the Challenge in a Rulebook and found them to be insufficient. That made me create a second version of the Rulebook. However, I got stuck at determining how to enforce the rules and motivate myself to work on the Challenge, hence I could not complete it at the end of the Challenge.

Because of how much I have done and learnt in the process, even if I did not manage to complete everything that I had aimed to, I will still be proud of myself for being a Challenger. It is not easy to keep going at something for 60 days, hence I shall not beat myself up over the many inadequacies I displayed in the Challenge.

Time passed by too quickly. I might have more thoughts on this Challenge so there may be a chance of me coming back to update the post. I will release an announcement through a new blog post when an update is made.