How To Gamify Your Life

Want to make your work or life more enjoyable? If so, learn how to gamify your life! Approach tasks, situations, and skills with a new approach.

You can gamify your life as a powerful and enjoyable way to be more motivated. In a previous post, I mentioned how gamifying your life can motivate you to work more. You do this by using the concept of the first ‘P’ of motivation – Play.

‘Play’ motivation is engaging in an activity because you enjoy doing it. You can utilise this principle by gamifying your life. Turn work into a series of enjoyable activities through setting challenges and obstacles.

There’s a lot of analogies in this post, so check the bottom for a small glossary. For now, know that your ‘playthrough’ is a work project or something similar.

How To Gamify Your Life – Level Ups

The idea of ‘levelling up’ your ‘abilities’ is one of the simplest ways to gamify your life and your work. Consider different attributes which you use while working:

Focus and attention span
Typing speed
Multi-tasking
Navigation (think computer shortcuts such as Alt-Tab, Ctrl-W, etc
Communication
Time-management
Willpower

Each of these can be levelled up by improving them. To make this more official, you can set milestones to qualify for a level up.

Using typing speed as an example, 50wpm (words per minute – you can test yours here) is level 1 / level 10. 60wpm is level 2 / level 20. The increments increase to 100wpm at level 5 / level 50 and beyond.

Bosses / The Final Boss

The easiest comparison that I can think of is milestones, deadlines, or goals. Think of certain intervals where you have specific targets. This could be pages of a document written, for example. These are bosses. Your final deadline is the final boss.

The progress to get there can be easier, depending on your skills and items. Levelling up your skills and using ‘equipables’ can make defeating this boss easier.

If you have no external deadline, try setting one. Make a boss. This creates excitement and motivation to prepare for the boss fight. Having this motivation will encourage you to develop your skills.

Equipables

Equipables or ‘items’ are things that you can use to improve your ‘playthrough’ of the game. One of my favourite equipables is music, which I can use to increase and level up my focus. Another example may be getting an ergonomic keyboard/mouse/mouse mat. Anything that you can ‘equip’ to better your gameplay is an equipable.

Also in this realm are ‘party members’. These are other members of your team who help you throughout your playthrough.

Obstacles and Challenges

Obstacles and challenges are the struggles that you face. You must overcome these to complete the game (your work) and defeat the final boss. These may be things such as having to restart your gameplay or the loss of a party member.

Score

To make your playthrough experience enjoyable, have some way of tracking your progress. A real-time score can help show your current position and brings out a competitive nature. For some occupations, this is easier than others. Pages completed, clients gained, products sold, shipments sent are all good examples.

Have a think about what works best for your specific occupation. You don’t have to limit yourself to one type of score, either. For the best results, track scores in several areas. This is also added motivation to keep going, as when one area isn’t going great, you can focus elsewhere!

Having a visual indicator of this is also very useful. You could use simple tallies on a whiteboard. You could track progress in your work company’s software. You could visualise a scoreboard in your head – whatever works. By having a visual way of being able to track your progress, it will keep you on track. I find a horizontal bar chart is simple and effective. Fill in the bar or boxes whenever progress is made.

Glossary

As promised, here are a glossary of terms used in this page:

Boss – A milestone with a challenge

Challenges / Obstacles – Temporary hurdles that must be overcome to progress with the game

Equipable – Something you can use alongside your work to improve the quality, efficiency, or temporarily ‘boost’ your levelled skills

Final Boss – A final deadline to complete the game

Game – The work task in its entirety

Levelling Up – Improving your skills

Party Member – A member of your team, either internal (inside the company) or external (freelancer)
Playthrough – Your current attempt at completing the game

Score – A realtime way of tracking progress

Wrapping Up

Do any of these seem appealing to you? Including some of these concepts can make your work more enjoyable. Granted, it’s difficult to gamify your work without complete freedom. So, for the non-self-employed among you, use the concepts that appeal to you the most. My favourites are Equipables and Leveling Up.

Thanks for reading.

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