Step 4. Creating your Quest Log
This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, turning your Goals into Quests and breaking those down into tasks! Who’s excited?
Hope you have that journal handy, or a good writing program, cause you’re going to need it.
So, we’ve established that each job has at least one goal associated with it. Some may have a few goals, but they all lean towards the same thing.
I’m going to be using three goals going through this, so we can see how they break down: learning a language, getting healthy, and buying a house.
Thus far, I’ve been using Quest and Goal almost interchangeably, but I think there are a few distinctions.
Quests are multi-step goals that take a longer period of time to achieve and may consist of multiple goals under them. For example, learning a language can have goals like being able to have a basic conversation in that language, being able to read a book, or talk about a specific interest. Each of these are stepping stones towards the quest of becoming fluent in that language.
Quest Chains, Side Quests, and the Main Story Quest
I think it’s important to take a moment to define a few key terms.
Quest Chains are quests that link together, one unlocking the next. Quest A is a prerequisite for doing Quest B. For example, learning how to say “Hello” is a prerequisite for introducing yourself in another language.
A side-quest is an optional quest that may give you more skills or bonus XP, but isn’t required to progress to the next quest in a chain. For example, learning vocabulary around a niche topic helps you be able to talk about that topic and will provide an opportunity to practice with the grammar you already know, but it’s not required to learn the next grammar point in your chain.
Think of it as a flow chart, where Quest Chains are all linked together, one unlocking after the other, with side-quests branching off. (Create a visual here)
Main Story Quests, (MSQ), then are the big quests that unlock a bunch of new quest chains and side quests. These are major milestones that mark progression. This could be like paying off all of your credit card debt. Suddenly you have different avenues available to you. Do you look into investing, what kind of investing? What changes do you make to your budget? What can you start saving for?
You are working towards these Milestones, these MSQ, and all the quests leading up to it help support you to get there.
Mind Mapping your Quests
To figure out how to get to the next MSQ, you’re going to need to see where you are. If your goal is to buy a house, your first quest needs to be know your financial position. This reveals that you have a low credit score because of credit card debt. The next quest in the chain is going to be pay down credit card debt.
You have some side quests here. You could look at changing your job so you have more income, or you could consolidate your debt so you have a lower interest rate. You’ll probably want to budget, and you might want to look at selling some things you don’t need anymore.
Eventually, you reach the MSQ of paying off the debt. Now, you saving the down payment is the next MSQ. The required chain would be to do market research and figure out how much you need, budgeting, and putting that money aside. Again, side quests can be budgeting, researching if you are eligible for any first time home buyer programs, deciding what you are looking for and keeping an eye on the market, maybe you can also look at investing and how to invest to make your money grow while you save it.
A benefit of looking at your goals in this way is you can adjust this map as you go. You don’t need to know in detail what’s beyond the next MSQ. After all, until you get there, you don’t even know what you don’t know or what else may have changed along the way. As you make progress, you may find an interesting side-quest that you didn’t know about before that you want to explore, one that starts a whole new quest chain that may not be related to this MSQ.
Quests and XP
Completing a quest grants some bonus XP. How much is going to depend on you and the quest. In general, I’m going with a regular quest is 25% of a level, and MSQs are 100% of the level.
So, if I I’m at level 3 and I need 20 XP for the next level, a regular quest gives 5 XP and an MSQ gives 20.
Dailies
In a lot of MMOs, there are quests that become available daily as a way to boost XP gain and allow even high level characters to grind some skills. These are dailies.
Some goals benefit from having daily action. This might be reading, or walking, or writing or anything else that you want to do everyday but are not. Dailies, then, are ways of rewarding yourself as you work towards making these daily tasks habits.
While gaining XP for doing these daily is great, unless you are doing them consistently, you may not get the same benefit.
Instead, Dailies gain XP if they are done a certain number of times a week.
4 days - 1 XP
5 days - 2 XP
6 days - 3 XP
7 days - 5 XP
Note: Your dailies should change at least once every 3 months. The idea is to build a habit that supports your goals, not to be a constant XP boost.
Achievements
An optional tool is Achievements. This can be used for metric that you track numerically or if you want to track how many times you’ve done something. For example, maybe walking 10,000 steps in a day is an achievement, so you get some bonus XP, or maybe learning 100 phrases is an achievement.
Achievements should happen once, with another level added above it. For example, 10,000 steps gets 2 bonus XP, 15,000 gets 5 XP, but the next time you get 10,000, you don’t get anything.
Achievements are about constantly raising the bar and getting you to push yourself.
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At some point, it may be impossible to reach the next achievement. After all, you might be able to walk 20,000 steps a day, but are you going to do 50,000? You could change to a number of steps a week or over the course of a month, but that’s not the easiest to track without a spreadsheet. How we deal with this may vary, but eventually, it’s time to do a reset. We’ll go over that next time.