How to Instantly Gamify Your Way to Productivity

Combining these two simple tricks just might snap you out of the paralysis of procrastination.

I’m not going to get into all the fun psychology and theory behind procrastination. Tim Urban has already done an amazing job with his articles Why Procrastinators Procrastinate, How to Beat Procrastination, and The Procrastination Matrix. If you’re looking for an illuminating birds-eye view of the Art and Science of Not Getting Things Done, you should go read those.

I’m here to give you two quick tactical maneuvers you can use right now to maybe break the cycle at least for a little bit. These are not silver bullets that will kill your procrastination forever. These are two little games you can play that might shake things up a bit.

These two tricks haven’t turned me into an unstoppable productivity machine overnight, but more often than not, they’ve made the difference between a day where nothing got done, and a day where several things got done.

OK. Here’s the first one.

The Dice Game

Most of the anxiety of procrastination lives in the paralysis of choice: Which task to do first? How to start? Let’s say I’ve got 4 tasks that really need to be done today, each of them taking up a decent amount of time.

1. First draft of this month’s Newsletter

2. Queue 1 week of Instagram posts on Hootsuite

3. Fulfill pending orders on client’s Etsy store

4. Finish 2nd draft of secret prototype app design

Now for the fun part: I add two more items to the list. One of them is to read a chapter of whatever book I’m currently reading. The other is something that I often do to distract myself from doing important stuff.

5. Read 1 chapter of TechGnosis

6. Goof off on Tumblr for 30 minutes

If you struggle with procrastination, or get easily distracted, and you don’t already have a healthy book-reading habit, I highly recommend always adding #5 to whatever list you make. Regardless of the fact that reading books is really important, putting this in your list is a form of training.

Looping through social feeds and binging on 3-minute reads is training your brain to be distracted. Reading actual books is training your brain to be focused. Anyway, back to the list, and the secret weapon that gives it power…

Thats right, it’s not up to you any more. You’re going to roll the die and do what it tells you. You are not in charge. The cube is in charge. You will obey the cube.

The cube has commanded me to read a chapter from my book.

It’s important to throw in that one totally non-productive task. This gives your hyperactive anti-work lizard-brain a glimmer of hope to hold on to, and increases the suspense of each roll.

We’ll come back to the list, but now that I’ve surrendered the burden of choice to a higher power, I’m ready to begin my first task, which leads us to the second tactical maneuver.

The Focus Tally

When you start your task, distraction is ready to pounce. You don’t have to run away from distraction, and you don’t have to fight it. Neither is fun, and neither is actually that helpful. Distractions are a fact of life, especially in the age of the Almighty Push Notification, not to mention the fact that our productivity machines and our distraction machines are now one and the same. What you’re going to do is keep track of the number of times you get distracted.

I pick up my book, I start reading. Before I can finish one page, I get a text from someone I’ve been waiting to hear back from. Without thinking about it, I put down the book, read their message, and send a reply. Once I pick the book back up, I think about it. I was just distracted. That means I get a tally mark. No judgment, just noticing and keeping track. Every time I become distracted from the task I’m engaged with, I add a tally mark.

After a few minutes of this, something interesting starts to happen. I start to feel the first twitching of the “distraction muscle”, the first sign of the Instant Gratification Monkey approaching from behind. I catch it before it pounces. My phone vibrates. I feel a surge of momentum pushing me to reach for it, but I’m too vigilant this time. I’ve avoided the distraction.

While I’m keeping track of the number of times I notice myself becoming distracted, I’m also keeping track of the number of times I notice myself avoiding distraction. By the time I’ve finished the chapter, the “dodged distraction” tally is almost 3x more than the “succumbed to distraction” tally. I’m not gonna lie, it feels pretty great.

The Dice Game, Part 2

So now that I’ve completed a task, I go back to my list, and I cross it off.

Everything on this list needs to get done before I do anything else, so rather than replacing the task with a new one, I take its number and give it to another task on the list, doubling its chances of being randomly chosen next.

I’m still not super stoked about completing any of the work stuff, so I’m going to cheat the odds towards goofing off on Tumblr.

I rolled again, and got a 3. Damn it! Real work.

It’s shocking how quickly you get used to allowing a 6-sided die to tell you what to do. I’m a mostly-rational human being, and I’m terrible at telling myself what to do. I’m amazing at coming up with a good idea of what to do next and then succeeding spectacularly in not doing it.

But as soon as I give up my decision-making power to a little plastic cube, I shrug and say “Well, the die said, so what are you gonna do?” and then I get to work, without any of the usual hemming and hawing. I’m not going to try to explain why this happens, but I’ll admit that I’m not the first to think of it.

Anyway, by the end of the working day, here’s how the lists will look:

Some interesting things to note:

1. It actually gets really exciting the more tasks I complete. I’ve injected my productivity with the addictive rush of gambling. When it comes time to shift the odds and roll the die again, I’ve almost stopped caring about what the tasks are because I’m so interested in which one is going to win. This has turned out to be another great way to give the list a mysterious glamour of power, further legitimizing its authority over my actions.
2. It’s important to apply the same focus and distraction-tallying to the “goof-off task”. I forced myself to commit to doing nothing but reblogging cool stuff on tumblr for 30 minutes straight. If I checked Facebook or Reddit during Tumblr time, I got a tally mark. Even if I felt like getting some work done (!), I would keep going on Tumblr. Forcing myself to fully engage with something that was usually a guilty pleasure of the Dark Playground, it made me see the whole situation in a new light.
3. It was really surprising how quickly the “almost distracted” tallies outpaced the “distracted” tallies. It really is like training a muscle, and the totals you see were mostly collected in the first half of the day. By the second half, I was so focused that I was barely adding to either tally group.
4. I definitely do not write neatly on cute little index cards every time I do this. The photos are staged for the sake of clarity. This is a process that occurs in scattered scribbles across various notebooks and scrap paper. All the best “productivity hacks” are messy affairs done out of the corner of your eye while in the center of the storm. Don’t get too precious about it or it’ll become another chore to avoid.

That’s about it. This is not a perfect system that I follow religiously, but it’s worked better for me than most of the other gimmicks I’ve tried. Let me know how it works for you.