PP 031: Gamifying Our Life

In this episode I discuss how we can add fun and efficiency to our personal and professional tasks by gamifying our life and adding incentive to their successful completion.

Resources

Positive Productivity Podcast Episode 11: Chronic Idea Disorder

Episode Transcription

Welcome back to another episode of positive productivity. This is your host, Kim Sutton.

If you’re like me, you may sometimes find that you have difficulty focusing on the task you have at hand, whether it be for your personal life or your professional life. Sometimes all those external activities can get in the way of getting one simple task done.

Today I’m going to talk to you about “Gamifying our life” so that we can have fun accomplishing these things while also making a game out of them.

Gamifying Our Life

I remember as a girl, my stepmother used to challenge herself to iron a whole basket of laundry in the time that it took to watch one television show. I never really understood her motivation then, but I do now. I do also have to mention we don’t have an iron in the house, so I can’t use that one personally in my life.  However, there are so many other activities that I do during the day that I love to challenge myself to see how fast I can get them done and if I can beat my personal best.

Gamifying our life allows us to turn repetitve or otherwise (possibly) boring tasks into an exciting adventure.

One of the ways that I stay focused on any given day is by listening to podcasts episodes while I work. This may be working on household tasks or on business tasks, but I will set a goal of wrapping up whatever I’m working on by the time the current podcast episode is finished. For example, we don’t have a dishwasher in our house. It’s just not something that the house came with and we haven’t undertaken the massive work of having our kitchen remodeled to fit a dishwasher in yet. So with all the people in my house, you can imagine that some days there are just a ton of dishes that need to be done.  What I do is I turn on a podcast episode and I challenged myself to get the whole kitchen cleaned during the time it takes to listen to that episode. I also do this with laundry, cleaning off my desk, cleaning up my office, and doing other random tasks around the house that need to be completed.

Podcast episodes also keep me focused while I am trying to work on client tasks. I will tell myself that while I am listening to this podcast episode, I could only work on this one specific task. If the task is completed before the podcast episode – Great!  then I have a couple of minutes that I can do something else, but if not, then I need to stay focused on what I am doing.

This might not seem like a game to you. It totally is to me because with chronic idea disorder and if you haven’t listened to my explanation of chronic idea disorder, you can go and listen at TheKimSutton.com/PP011. With chronic idea disorder I am constantly getting new ideas in my head, but using this podcast, gamifying our life method, I stay focused on what I’m doing and I charge ahead.

If you’re having trouble staying focused, find some type of incentive that will help you charge ahead and if you meet the goal, reward yourself. I honestly don’t reward myself except with a pat on the back, but I know some people will say: “Hey, if I work for eight hours today on client tasks, then I can reward myself at the end of the week” I think that’s a great way of doing it. Maybe it’s not just for working eight hours on client work today. Maybe it’s for meeting this week’s quota on this, that, or any other thing.

What are you going to do for yourself? What is the reward? Explore different ways that you can gamify your personal and professional life so that you can have fun and whistle while you work.  

Gamifying can take place in so many ways and aspects throughout both our personal and professional lives and I would love to hear how you may have already put it into action in your life. Please visit TheKimSutton.com/PP031, and let me know how you have gamified your personal or professional life.

Now, with all that said, I have big goals to tackle for today, so I’m going to jump to them, until the next episode. Make it a positive and productive day.