How to Make Productivity More Fun

the secret to sustainable productivity is to find a way to make the thing that we're trying to do a little bit more fun when you're having fun productivity takes care of itself and you don't need to worry about things like discipline and grit and willpower and motivation and all that stuff to coerce ourselves into doing the thing the problem with that philosophy is that there are some things that are just boring there are some things that are just not fun that we don't want to do that we have to do anyway but for those things

there is an answer that answer is to make it fun by using an idea called gamification now the idea of gamification has been around for like a long time it's sort of been co-opted by companies like amazon and stuff using gamification to make their workers work more and more but there is a way that we can use gamification to make our own lives more fun in terms of making the boring that we have to do more enjoyable so that we are more likely to do it because we know we have to do the thing anyway

and there's this really good book called actionable gamification by this chap yukai chu chow who i would like to interview on my podcast at some point he is a sort of human-centered design creative consultant type person so this is more like a textbook to help people designing things like video games help them figure out okay what are the things that make video games interesting and how do we bring more of those into products and games and experiences that we're designing but if you just read the first like i don't know 10 of it you actually

get some pretty solid principles that you can apply to your life to make anything you're doing a little bit more fun and that's what we're talking about in today's video and really the core thesis here is that video games have managed to find a way to make boring stuff more fun like no one ever has to play a video game people have to go to work but they get home from the end of that hard day of work and they log on to some kind of video game and they play for hours and hours often

into the night time often knowing that it's a bad thing to do but there's something about video games that draws people in and makes them waste spend use enormous amounts of time and money on these video games so the question is what is it that drives motivation in video games and this guy yukai has come up with this thing called the octalysis framework which is basically a list of eight core drivers that video games tap into and if we understand what those core drivers are we can sort of reverse engineer and incorporate those strategies into

any boring stuff that we have to do to make it more fun okay so the first drive is epic meaning and calling now the idea here is that if the thing that you are doing the thing that you're working on the mission that you're on the adventure that you're on feels like it's part of some wider meaning or some wider purpose that will just automatically make whatever the thing is you're doing more enjoyable and more motivating you're a wizard harry now this is actually a very big question like how do we find purpose and what

we do so i'm going to come back to that and let's move on to number two and number two is called development and accomplishment now in video game context development and accomplishment is when we are leveling up and when we are getting things done when we're completing quests when we're leveling up in world of warcraft and we get a little ding and we post ding in our guild chat people oh my god congrats you've hit level 80. and there is something remarkably motivating about this idea of leveling up and so the real life version of

this is that if you are doing something which is boring and you have to do it anyway one way to make it more fun is to try and incorporate this idea of accomplishment into the thing that you're doing for example authors what they often do is they track their word count they have a little progress bar at the top of their page and they're like right every day i need to bang out 2 000 words or 4 000 words and then as they're typing stuff they can literally see that little progress bar filling like a

leveling up bar and so if they ever need that extra motivation to do the thing they just look at the world count and they think okay cool i'm making progress it's the progress bar another way you can apply this to your own life that i found really helpful is actually just making a to-do list and ticking things off we've all had that feeling it's incredibly satisfying to go on a to-do list like type right things out and then take them off and cross them out that taps into our core drive for development and accomplishment and

that makes anything boring a little bit more fun the next core driver that we have is empowerment of creativity and feedback so what's this like in video games let's take a video game like the soul series elden ring for example and people die repeatedly in those games but as you're doing the thing as you're repeatedly falling to margaret and dying 120 times put these foolish ambitions to rest you're figuring out ways that you can beat the boss you're figuring out what the strategies are you're sort of figuring out the timing of their attacks you're using

your creativity and the way he defines creativity in the book it's like finding multiple ways to solve the same problem ultimately you're always trying to take down the boss but you're trying to find different ways of going about it and there's something about that even if you're just dying repeatedly and repeatedly night after night after night to that particular boss there's something incredibly motivating about finding those extra solutions to the problem and then the other way in which video games like really tap into this empowerment thing is by giving us immediate feedback and so if

we want to apply this to our lives to make whatever boring stuff we have to do a little bit more fun we want to think about okay how can i be more creative with this and how can i get quicker feedback one of the real problems that causes procrastination and like leads to low motivation is the idea that generally the things we procrastinate from the things we find boring and hard and we don't want to do but we have to do what we should do are the things that have a long term payoff that don't

have an immediate term reward and so that's why one strategy that you can use is to shorten the feedback loops if for example you're a student and you're trying to study for an exam but that exam is like a whole year away it's really hard to motivate yourself to do the thing whereas if for example you could test yourself every week and treat it like a video game treat it like a personal challenge that's how i approach tests and exams it's like a personal game that i'm playing with myself or i'm sort of in kind

of friendly competition with my friends but like we're not taking it too seriously it's just a personal game and that means whenever i'm testing myself i'm getting that real-time feedback i'm shortening the feedback loop and then i get the sense of empowerment that as i'm doing the thing i'm improving which taps into our development and accomplishment core drive as well but it's really all about shortening the feedback loop to make almost anything that's inherently boring and feel and a little bit long-term a little bit more fun the fourth drive is called ownership and possession and

this taps into a fundamental need for autonomy for ownership for a sense of control over the things that we're doing and again this is something that really video game designers take huge advantage of i clocked in for example like 190 non-stop days worth of play time on world of warcraft because it was my character i could upgrade my character i could get my own gold do my own jewelcrafting and inscription and all that crap but it's like video gamers will work so much they'll put in so much time money and effort into leveling up their

own characters because they feel that sense of autonomy that sense of ownership so how do we apply this to our day-to-day lives to make whatever we're doing more fun well i've kind of got three different things that i try and think about when i'm applying this to my life and that's ownership of the outcome ownership of the process and ownership of the belief all right so ownership of the outcome generally if you're having to do something that's not boring but you have to do it you might not have ownership of the actual outcome you might

not be able to actually choose what you're doing you just know you have to do it but if you can choose what you're doing one way of doing that is by for example taking a little bit more responsibility it's one of those like weird counter-intuitive things that like if you're finding something boring the wrong way to approach it is by putting less effort into it the wrong way people approach boring stuff that they find hard and don't really want to do but they have to do anyway is by thinking you know what i'm just going

to do the bare minimum i'm going to coast and then i'll have time in the evenings to play video games instead if you actually like weirdly if you put a little bit more effort in take a little bit more ownership a little bit more initiative a little bit more responsibility usually the thing just becomes more fun by default because autonomy is one of the core drivers of intrinsic motivation dan ping talks about this in the book drive really good book all about intrinsic motivation this is a big topic in actionable gamification as well like ownership

autonomy responsibility is a core driver of why we find things enjoyable but even if you don't have ownership of the outcome you can have ownership of the process usually let's say you're at work or at school or whatever and you're told what to do you're not necessarily told how you have to do it and so you can make the how your own you can find a way again to exercise creativity which speaks to core driver number three creative expression empowerment feedback that kind of thing you can find a way to incorporate creativity and your own

autonomy into the process behind the thing that you're doing for example if you're working as a junior doctor you're kind of a bit of an admin monkey you have to write these kind of summaries for patience and discharge summaries and stuff it can get kind of boring but if you make the process your own and if you figure out a way to have fun with it change up the fonts and do it in a nicer way and change up the formatting so it's a bit clearer those are all those little things that you can you

can take ownership of and that makes this sometimes boring thing a lot more fun because you're taking ownership and ultimately even if you have no ownership of the outcome and you literally physically have no possibility of having ownership of the process you're in the kind of job or thing where you're told what to do and how to do it to a letter you always have ownership over the mindset the belief with which you're trying to do the thing and the way i think about it is that sort of there's two ways of looking at the

things that we have to do we can think of it as have to we can think of it as get to this is from a great blog post by seth godin that i read a few years ago that i keep i keep on coming back to any time i'm doing something and i feel like the thing is boring and i feel like ah i have to do this thing i try and take a step back and go into my mind and think you know what no i don't have to do this thing i get to

do this thing i am blessed to be able to do this thing to have the privilege to do this thing sometimes that's a bit of a stretch but the more i tell myself this the more my brain you know hebs law axons that fire together wire together all this stuff the more that we can tell ourselves a particular thought the more likely that thought is to become a natural extension of who we are and a natural part of how our brain works so for me now you know sometimes i think i have to film all

these videos today i think no i get to film all these videos today this is really fun and there's something about that that really taps into this core drive that we have for ownership autonomy responsibility and that is a big part of what makes stuff fun in real life core driver number five which we can incorporate into whatever we're doing is called social influence and relatedness and basically what this means is that we find things more fun if people in our social group are also doing the thing and we feel like we can do it

as part of a group again video games take advantage of this massively a game like world of warcraft which is stupidly popular or these big like final fantasy mmorpgs the ideas that you're doing with friends you're getting into a group there's like a social element of the game and so the way we can apply that in real life is we can find a way to bring our friends or bring people into the boring stuff that we're trying to make more fun for example with me back in the day when i was studying for medical school

exams instead of trying to do it on my own i would just get some friends and we'd all go to the same library and we'd all be working on different subjects but we'd all be doing the pomodoro technique together where we'll work for 25 minutes then we take a five minute break then we do another 25 minutes and five minute break and we repeat the process and there was just something magical about the fact that we were doing it as a group that made this boring thing potentially boring thing are you studying for exams a

lot more fun purely by the addition of other people into the thing if you can't work with people in real life there are websites like focusmate where you can literally have a zoom co-working accountability buddy there's things like writer's hour which is this completely free zoom co-working session that the london writer salon runs four times a day for different time zones and the idea behind that is that you get on the same zoom call with about 300 people and you're all doing some writing you're working on your own thing but you're doing it with other

people and that just makes it way more fun so those were the white hat kind of the nice ways of gamification the other three are the black hat ways of gamification these are you know we can incorporate them into our lives to make our lives a little bit more like a game-like but i wouldn't say it makes necessarily makes our lives more fun so i'm just gonna blitz through these so core driver number six is scarcity it's the feeling of wanting something that we don't have and again video games take advantage of this there's this

ah that piece of gear that you really want but you can't have it until you do all this stuff and so you spend ages and ages doing all this stuff just so you can get this thing which has no intrinsic value but which has value to you because of the scarcity then there's unpredictability and curiosity which is core driver number seven which is the kind of the sense that we get from like oh i'm not sure what's going to happen next this is the system that slot machines and gambling like gambling places what are they

called casinos really exploit because the unpredictability of the reward is what really fires that dopamine release and then the final core driver core driver number eight is loss and avoidance it's like we fight really hard to avoid losing something and so often in video games video games really exploit the sense of fear of missing out uh i have to log in every day to complete my daily quests because if i don't i will miss out on those points that i could have gotten and it's got a cap on it and therefore it's like you know

the loss and avoidance and our intrinsic desire to not lose the things that we have or not miss out on things keeps us logging into these video games time and time again these final three i mean there's different ways of incorporating them into a life one way that you can use if you really want to is for example by putting money on the line if you know you really want to do something but you're not able to do it you're finding yourself procrastinating you could just give a significant amount of money to a friend and

say hey i want you to keep this money and you only give it back to me once i've done the thing that's a very easy way to for example fake motivate yourself into doing the thing that you want to do because you're trying to avoid that sense of losing money but again i don't really like it i don't think it's a particularly sustainable strategy i prefer the first five kind of these more white hat strategies that we can apply to anything we're doing in life to make it a little bit more fun now the thing

i talked about the core driver number one this idea of grand meaning and vision purpose in life that is the ultimate driver of what drives intrinsic motivation a sense of purpose but it can be genuinely quite hard to actually figure out what our own sense of purpose is and generally this is a really hard thing to figure out but there are three techniques in particular that i've come across over the last few years that i found super helpful in actually trying to figure out what the hell do i actually want to do with my life

what is this grand purpose or vision and stuff and all of that is in this video over here so if you haven't seen that recommend watching it thank you so much for watching and see you there bye