How to get addicted to tasks, optimize your time, and get the life you want
Will gamification work changing the playing field for ADHD? Research from a top ten player in Online Gaming. Research in conjunction with the The Bluprnt Foundation, Smart Founders Think Tank
Let’s start here with some wisdom that only costs one thing to learn, a life.
All pain comes from attachment
When you give permission to pain
A healthy life can ensue
“the root of suffering is attachment, because the only constant in the universe is change” The Buddha
There is power in these words which brings to bear an interesting question, “What can a perspective, understanding, and an individual, if they work together, accomplish?” If you have a taste for maxing your output, you have issues with task management, or have a thing for RPG style games and you want to get down on some focus and organization then you may find this valuable. Allow me to lay in some context on this study before we get truck’n here.
These are promises I will make to you the reader for giving me the opportunity to write this.
First, this is going to be a fun ride with rich rewards, or I wouldn’t be doing it, where we explore the idea of how to get addicted to something that helps you achieve your goals.
Second, we will look at motivation, focus, and incentives from a baseline.
Third, we will be doing this in a way where you will be researching this with me as I go along and so our theory will progress iteratively, step by step.
Fourth, This will be well correlated information with credit going to anyone that brings in more information as this can be updated iteratively.
Lastly, you will be able to get more out of this if you take notes and leave comments to discuss and debate. So, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more”, and cheers in advance to our success!
Letting you know where I come from and why I might be able to speak to this I used to play World of Warcraft to a level that I was in a top ten world setting. Keeping several characters competitive, leading multiple guilds, recruiting, beta testing products, hosting community events, and managing the logistics for multiple groups of twenty five to two hundred people was a breeze and I loved seeing our teams win, and win, and win more setting some the top world records for the time in what we were doing. I had just left a high school military academy, and looking back I guess I got to play war for a while, and I was quite good at it. It was glorious!
After that I went off to build think tanks and work on skunk works style/moonshot projects where I spearhead, recruit, coordinate, and organize groups. So, this subject is important to me because I can help and give to more people if we figure out things like this, including me of course, which I’ve been told I should include in more credit, haha :D.
Recently when looking at my own life where I would say that I’m motivated yet felt that my organization around tasks and completion was lacking or at least, needing better understanding. I thought, “what is going on under the hood? I’m obviously able to do this, but it feels like there is something to this grind thing that I’m missing.” What I realized was that I was missing the incentive or the understanding and felt like I wasn’t at the wheel of the car as much as I could be. I wanted to drive myself like a car instead of being in a car that drives you where it wants and you have little to no choice in the matter. So, we will look at how to get at the wheel of your tasks and the things that add up, with balance, to a healthy life being successful how you choose. Our goal is to turn this into a tool that works for us, instead of having little control or worse the decision being made for us as people. Now, this may be right or wrong however our intention is to learn, and the truth shall reveal itself, let’s do it!
Proposition to the motivation audience, the theory.
As we all know video games are famous for being addictive and wouldn’t you know it, they have teams of developers and people who study incentive. If you then pair that with hooking people up to output meters in labs to study how high your rewards like dopamine and serotonin are spiking during the use of and downtime around the games we play. This helps gaming scientists know how effective the product will be at getting people addicted. Which in a way I can truly salute yet I had to wonder “why don’t I turn this around to make my ability to get addicted so easily my choice?” If that makes sense then keep going.
On top of motivation is this perspective here is some good ole’ fashion research with a number of sources cross referenced as I want to know just like you, “how can I get more focused and reward myself with a choice that has a long term benefit of a mindset shift. I’m pretty sure you will enjoy what I found.
My theory here is that if this can be made fun and there is some kind of fungibility into rewards then we can reprogram a number of emotional biases that we have like “tedious” or “boring” to instead seeing the long term incentives of learning, discipline and challenges and of moving away from things that give you the easiest hit of dopamine like distractions. The user then regains control of their decision making by not following just a distraction but which instead builds upon a foundation of awareness through the practice of things like discipline. Overall this will lead to the person having a stronger “will power” for targeting any addiction needed, which is just forming habits, or the understanding and ability to work through present ones that may become undesirable. So, if we are to be addicted so easily and our daily tasks are at the heart of our survival, I feel it’s worthwhile to explore this, so we might become addicted ourselves, knowingly, with permission. Make it work for you, a system of addiction that you are aware of.
“If you don’t understand something then you are doomed to repeat it”
Here is the list of what I found and what products and teams we will look at during this please check out their work, they are all great in their own way.
A list of currently available teams that have tried to solve this with RPG/Video Game Approaches
Remember the milk – Gets around the game aspect with themes you can customize the app with
Paper RPQ Personal Planner – If you prefer, for people that would like to do this on paper and probably have a great imagination.
Non-RPG
With a reddit discussion using this as a habit tracker
There is even a university for task scheduling. Wow!
Emotional notes while researching that people shared with me or that I felt
Tedious
I found that my resistance to breaking down a goal was because of my inner desire to hide behind excuses – Ches_LLYG
Tedious and cause us to lose motivation
“Tough because I would have to go back through and create the tasks on the list retrospectively that I ended up having to do if they hadn’t been considered, I would prefer that this be auto assigned like daily tasks.” – Anonymous Survey
Also, here are my thought notes while researching:
Goals can only be set for things that you can actually buy with your personal currency. This is limited to what you can afford yourself outside of a market economy. Which brings up a fascinating thought that extends into the selling of time or control of a personal through a personal token. Reference to the movie In Time where people sell their life essence like their time as a currency and the age of personal tokens with possibilities coming from NFT’s.
Thoughts: One, this could be within a scope like belief in Bluprnt where power ups are part of a daily bonus process. Two, that if the task that you might want points for weren’t planned for you probably shouldn’t be awarding yourself as you need to instead revisit your capacity and therefore planning.
The cover at the top, and this also, are posters from the movie, “In Time” which is a fantastic futuristic experience. I would highly recommend it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time
Moving On
Imagine that you have a goal or a completion point that you are shooting to accomplish. To get there is a path with a series of steps. During this process there needs to be daily accomplishment that you can achieve readily. So, here is a system where you set up a goal and a series of daily goals that will gather what is needed to achieve that. We are going to look for things that can take people to another “level” and find out how this works from some of the best researchers, scientists, and developers. This takes inspiration from video games and daily quests.
In closing there will be a series of articles released on this subject from things like self generating games for RPG’s on top of a to do list, VR that helps with adoption and training since I did not find a known VR to-do-list group (Will work on this soon).
Please leave feedback as we will check it and may add it to the research. Leave your comments below.
To everyone, safe journeys, do your research, stay informed, and organized!
