Gamify your Life

Are you actively gaming yourself, or are you being played?

I am a big believer in and active user of gamification to design nudges that increase productivity and encourage the action you wish to take, particularly repeated action.

In fact, you can’t escape it. If you aren’t doing this, someone else is doing it to you.?

Our actions are programmed and driven by dopamine. It’s happening to you right now. This social media feed, even as one of the more ‘healthy’ and useful ones, is designed to trigger dopamine as you read, swipe and interact with it. That’s why you instinctively go to your phone five times more frequently each day than you intend to, and suddenly realise you’ve wasted half an hour. People aren’t overeating because they love the taste of the food, it’s because the highly processed food that is so bad for you but cheap to manufacture triggers dopamine which makes you want to eat it, again and more.?

You can take this power back - you can slowly re-programme what gives you dopamine and make conscious choices to change your habits by using the same tricks for positive action for yourself. Or you can just let others keep playing you like a puppet or an NPC in a computer game. Which do you choose???

You can use this yourself, design this together as a team, and even build these principles into how you run your organisation.

1. Identify what you want to do (or what you want to stop doing). A recent example for me was to establish a regular exercise habit before doing anything else in the day. Another example is to actively post value content here on LinkedIn to build the business and the brand. You can apply this to anything - skills development, mundane admin, getting proactive about networking, job search, creativity, productivity in meetings; you name it.
2. ?Now work out how to generate dopamine to reward yourself. For me I’m a bit of a nerd and love a good dashboard, so I built some measurements into my journaling and my business management tools to track these activities to show I’d done these actions, and also for the latter to give me insights to learn how to do it more effectively. If you’re not a dashboard nerd, there are plenty of other ways - you can find a fun activity that currently gives you dopamine to do straight after to reward yourself, or find some other way to celebrate it that gives the dopamine. The early morning exercise is a good example of something that feels painful and hard to do consistently at first, but soon starts to create its own dopamine when your body is used to it and has been programmed to associate dopamine with the activity.?
3. And now repeat. Both looking for new actions to start or stop doing, and regularly reviewing the important activities you want to keep doing and how they trigger dopamine. As you become more self aware around this, you’ll start to see how devices such as phones and other activities trigger your dopamine and how this influences you.

You can also reduce the dopamine triggered by activities you no longer want to do as much by detoxing. By consciously abstaining from the activity for a period of time, the longer the better, you can reduce the association you have for this and reduce the programmed motivation to pick up that phone, or eat that junk. This also reduces the dopamine tolerance you have built up, so you actually appreciate it more again, so enjoy that if the activity is relatively harmless but don’t let it hook you in again.?

Over time you can use this yourself, with your team, and even to change the culture of your organisation, by associating rewards with productive healthy activity and dissociating them with unhealthy or unproductive actions. Just be careful when using this with others that you do this for a true win-win; manipulation will inevitably backfire and destroy healthy culture. Also be very aware of the ‘real’ action the motivation creates, which may be different to the action that you intend. Metrics driven behaviour can have a real twist in the tail, as people will naturally and unconsciously game things to optimise.

So are you a player, or are you being played??

Use gamification to design nudges that increase your productivity and encourage you to act.

Play the game your way, and enjoy the game.

This content by James Carter is licensed under CC BY 4.0