by Mark Klingelhoefer, owner of Electric Entrepreneur
Are you struggling to stay motivated and accomplish your goals?
In the realm of goal setting, there are an overwhelming amount of principles you can implement to improve your goal-setting process such as SMARTER goals, time blocking, and milestones. There is one overlooked principle however that may be the solution you’re looking for: gamification.
What Is Gamification?
Gamification is defined as the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity.
In other words, gamification is the use of video-game-like elements in everyday activities.
How Does Gamification Bulletproof Your Goals?
While other principles of goal setting focus on aspects such as managing time and increasing discipline, gamification focuses on one idea that other principles don’t – helping you enjoy the process of achieving your goals.
By applying game-like elements and principles to non-game activities, gamification can make achieving your goals more engaging, rewarding, and fun.
How to Implement Gamification in Goal-Setting
Form a Streak.
Forming a streak is a simple, yet effective idea.
Looking at your streak and seeing how many days you’ve exercised or read in a row shows you how much progress you’ve made. By engaging in a streak, you’ll only want to make the streak bigger and you know that if you fail to meet your goal one time, your streak will end and you’ll have to start over again.
Create a Reward System.
A reward system is a system put in place where you reward yourself for accomplishing a goal or completing a milestone that’s a part of your goal.
A big goal of mine a couple of years ago was to learn about investing so I enrolled in an investing course. The problem with the investing course was that it was pretty boring. It was the last thing I wanted to take part in after working all day.
I decided that I wasn’t going to complete this goal through sheer willpower, so I created a reward system for it. I told myself that after one hour of participating in the course, I would reward myself with a fun-size dark chocolate candy bar. And that was all it took.
My brain began to associate dark chocolate with the course and because of this, the process of sitting down and watching the course became much easier and I completed the course in less than a week.
Download An App.
Another way to gamify the process is to download an app on your phone that does the process for you. Habitica, an app on the iOS app store, is a perfect example of this.
You create your goals in the app and determine if you’re doing them on a daily, weekly, monthly, or one-time basis.
Every time you complete these goals, your character in the app gets experience points and coins. Your character levels up the more experience points you get and you are able to buy items for your character with coins. These items include armor, weapons, pets, and you can even exchange your coins for activities to reward yourself in real-life like watching a movie.
If you don’t complete your goals, however, your character loses health and can even die!
Get Creative.
The best part about gamifying the goal-setting process is that it’s completely up to you. Let your creative juices flow and create a gamification process that applies to you!
I’ve seen many unique approaches to gamifying your goals in the past and one approach, in particular, stood out to me. A friend of mine who owns a social media marketing company is a huge Dragon Ball Z fan and he tailored his gamification process to the show.
He showed me how he assigned points for each of his goals and associated points with the power levels of the characters in Dragon Ball Z. Each time he completed a goal, he leveled up and got closer to the character with the highest power level in Dragon Ball Z. In his level structure, there were more than 70 characters!
