It’s no secret that we do our best work when we are having fun. So how can we hack our minds to enjoy everything we do so we can reach maximum productivity?

The issue with most task managers and habit trackers is that they are boring. Checking off a daily to-do list or habit tracker, while momentarily satisfying, does not visually indicate that we are making progress towards our goals.

For the longest time, our community passionate about productivity has been endlessly curious about why we are so eager to put in thousands of hours playing video games, binging shows, and posting on social media – but often spend minimal effort and time building up our success plan and working on our habits for personal growth.

After detailed analysis, we found that these forms of entertainment make use of 3 fundamental gamification principles that greatly enhance the experience:

1. Engaging Story Telling

It’s always easy to determine the why, what and how within games and shows. There is always an overarching plot or storyline that explains why the characters are behaving in a certain way, what they want to achieve, and you are often watching to learn how they will go about the process.

In life, we don’t automatically have that clarity – and when we are unsure about the why, what, and how, we feel demotivated and end up being unproductive. It’s very disengaging whenever we spend tremendous effort and time with unsatisfactory long term results.

2. Measurable Progression

Good games are very good at ensuring you are never lost in your progression in their virtual world. The game makes it clear what the next objective is at all times, and what equipment or level requirements are necessary to proceed. Real life is definitely not so simple!

Social media has taken advantage of our innate human desire to obtain quantifiable success metrics by offering virtual internet points for users who share the most viral content. Likes and followers have little extrinsic value, but we go crazy for them because they hint a certain degree of influence, validation, and success on the platform.

3. Social interactions through community

We are social creatures and get the most engaged with the entertainment mediums that have successfully built a tribe. Multiplayer games are fun because we can play with and against friends, or make new ones from around the world. We enjoy the shows that are talked about and recommended in our social circles. And social media…well it’s obvious that the value of the platform is the engagement of the community.

However – games, shows, and social media gamify our behavior for their benefit. It is not healthy or in our best interest to be interacting on these platforms for hours at a time; it only serves the publisher, not ourselves. So, our hypothesis was that if we can learn the principles of gamification and apply it in our everyday lives, we have the immense opportunity to improve ourselves by hacking our mind to make work fun, and get stuff done.

Turn Your Life Into A RPG

With #theGamificationProject, we had 2 BIG challenges we wanted to solve.

1. How can we go to work and love what we do?
2. How can be highly motivated to pursue personal growth even after a busy day?

This huge collaborative project was built with my friends, family, and community to motivate us to live our best life and inspire a global movement. – Conrad Lin

There have been a few great applications out there that’s already been attempting to gamify habits, goals, and achievements like Habitica – but we always found that they had a lot of constraints when it came to the reality of the work we need to accomplish on a day by day basis.

Source: Habitica.com

The nature of software-as-a-service applications is that they offer limited customization options for the general user, and having 4M+ users, they had to make a lot of assumptions and generalizations to accommodate their large user base. Thus, we set out to build our own application where everybody can have full control over the customization, enabling features to be added and shared at any time.

We built on top of Notion, the all-in-one productivity tool. Notion makes the work we do collaborative and sharable. The app’s biggest advantage is enabling regular users to unlock the power of databases, and create powerful and unique workflows with their built-in custom formula capabilities and beautiful database views. This no-code tool enables anybody to duplicate a template of their choosing, and then customize limitlessly to build the systems that they need.

“I used Habitica for a long time and I think this template is the perfect replacement of that.”

– Rownok Rahman

 

Benefits

#theGamificationProject is a template that increases productivity by building gamification into your everyday life – awarding experience points and gold rewards as you successfully accomplish milestones throughout your day.

This template further boosts productivity by enabling live leaderboard functionalities, promoting friendly competitions between friends, family, and community. Work together with your loved ones to keep your pets alive by embarking on shared quests such as completing daily quests, exercising consistently, or accomplishing big goals!

Killer Features

Every aspect of this template is 100% customizable. You can choose which milestones award you points or gold, and how much to award at a time. You can also choose how much you want to penalize yourself for missing deadlines, and inversely, how much to reward yourself for closing tasks early. You can choose to reward yourself upon completing 70% of all the routine habit-building tasks you wanted to accomplish today, or you can reward yourself only when you complete 100%. It’s all up to you.

Create your own badges to reward yourself based on milestones that you want to accomplish, or build your own reward structure based on your own currency system. Motivate yourself to complete your reflections by earning loot boxes that grant random rewards of your choosing based on how effective you have been throughout the day.

Harness powerful analytics to understand yourself better. Build your own analytics dashboard to track the wins you care about and match data from different parts of the system to generate insights about your life to optimize your productivity.

Make work really fun by immersing yourself into your favorite fantasy world and embark on your own unique adventure! Our library continuously grows as our community members build new themes that they care about.

Limitless Extension

We’ve had countless community members improve and build on the project. We release updates every month sharing the best of the co-creation and collaboration from our thousand-strong community. Explore our roadmap!