Gamification: How to Keep Going

I’ve already touched on how everyday is the first day of the rest of your life, so I won’t go over that again. Suffice it to say, if you are ready to make a change, the first change is how you look at your life and how you structure your day.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

There are so many systems out there meant to allow a person or an organization to achieve their goal the best. There’s Agile, and Getting things done, and a million apps or tools out there geared at making it easier to work as a team and move forward. Each of them focus on the people as a being of productivity, someone who goes and does stuff that needs to be done without taking life into consideration.

I’m over simplifying, and probably showing a bias because I don’t feel like these work well when implemented too strictly. At least, not for me.

So, this year, I’m trying something a little different: Gamification

Gamification is the attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by simulating experiences similar to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users. This is generally accomplished through the application of game design elements and game principles (dynamics and mechanics) in non-game contexts.
– Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification

I love games. I enjoy playing them, the escape of them. And some of my favourite games are RPGs, that is, Role Paying Games, where you play as a character and follow their story, achieving missions or quests along the way that offer rewards and allows for you to gain skills and interact with the world around you. Many of these allow you to play the way you want to and develop the skills you want.

I’m talking about video games, but there’s also table top games like Dungeons and Dragons that allow you just as much flexibility, if not more, because you aren’t constrained by what has been programmed. If you have a good Dungeon Master, a table top game lets you create your own skills and quests that explicitly match your own tastes.

The common idea here is that you do things, a task, a quest, or just run around the world, and you gain experience that allows you to gain levels. Levelling up is a way of marking your progress, and to unlock new skills or quest lines.

So, when 2025 came around, I decided I wanted to try to gamify my life. After all, I find that I can start strong, but I lack the ability to carry through. Maybe adding continual chances to gain ‘experience’ will help that.

I’ve tried it out for the first few weeks of January, just to see how the daily actions of it feels, and it’s not bad. It needs work, but it’s going.

Over the next few days, I’ll break down what I have so far.