I thought about what you said and I think the root cause of my dissatisfaction is that when I communicate, my words are rarely interpreted how I mean and I rarely pick up on sub communications.
I have put a lot of work into myself, and in particular, trying to understand other people.
When I said "normal", I meant people who adapt or normalize into groups. I had no idea that it was offensive when I wrote it, or even if your response is sarcastic, or if you are implying that I'm narcissistic, or if my compliment was condescending, or what? I can think of a lot of possibilities...
I like your ideas for gamification. Putting it into action! Thanks!
That’s not really your fault. Very few people pick up on my sense of humor. And no, you didn’t offend me, and I don’t think you’re a narcissist or that your message demonstrates tendencies for negative personality traits in any way.
If anything, my objective was to add a little humor to the board to inspire a sense of comraderie and togetherness between the respondents here, and yourself as well.
If robot communication works best for you, though, I’m equally comfortable with that style! Actually, speaking sociably and developing my sense of humor is something I’m less comfortable with, and am working on.
Allow me to share some gamification examples with you! Do you have a printer? I can send you a “game sheet” to print out that will allow you to just fill in a few bits to tailor the page to your personal goals and needs!
Making these sheets is like a little hobby of mine. They’ve helped me to snap out of apathy/lethargy/depression and into productivity time, and time again, and over the years, I’ve refined them for optimal enjoyment.
The best part about my sheets is that, as I progress through my day, filling them out gives me immediate spikes of dopamine, and reviewing them at the end of the day puts me in a positive mood at night - a time of day which can be the most prone to generating negative thoughts and emotions.
Thank you for explaining! I appreciate it a lot actually.
I like your personality and sense of humor. Probably if we were speaking in person it would be totally different.
This is one of the things that I struggle with, people will say one thing and I think they are being serious, and then they say something else and I think they are joking. Then my mind gets stuck in a loop processing all of the possible narratives.
You can speak to me however you want, I will just assume your intention is positive and work on forming a sense of humor myself...
Yeah, I would like to see the gamification if you want to send it to me. I'm like a mile walk to the library and can print it there. Thank you!
Alright so, give this design a try.
Here's how you use this to manage productivity.
This picture has different scales, numbered sections, and graphical regions that you can color in, write on, or otherwise manipulate to visually chart your daily progress.
How you put your pencil to the picture is up to you, however, you want to decide for yourself what a productive day would look like, and how you'll systematically use this picture to measure the productiveness of your day. I've broken the picture down into various different "structure types". Some of them are great for tracking incremental milestones that are part of a larger project. Other ones are good for singular tasks, like a dentist appointment. There's space between the elements, so you can jot down labels for the structures if you want a little reminder as to what you're using them for.
As you can see, the picture gives you quite a bit of flexibility. What you'll do is make a productivity plan for how you want your day to go. Test it out, and at the end of the day, at the top, you'll give yourself a score. If that productivity plan didn't quite work out the way you wanted it to, you can tweak it to your liking for the next day. The picture is just a visual representation of progress. It doesn't dictate what you do, so you'll be able to change your methods as much as necessary until high scores feel comfortably challenging to reach.
Three of these pictures should fit on one sheet of paper, because I drew the picture to work within those dimensions.
Here's instructions for how to use it:
(1) Print out three to a sheet. If you'd like, you can even cut them out, and then fold one of the pictures into fourths, lengthwise, and stick it in your wallet like a business card. Remember - the back is blank, so you have room for notes if you need them. I advise you to not print the pictures front and back.
(2) On a sheet of paper, write out your life goals, a daily to-do list, and a list of tasks you need to complete. (These might be projects, which you can break up by milestones, or they might be something like 'go to doctors appointment').
(3) Next, make two lists. One will be a permanent list - the other, temporary. On your permanent list, organize, and rewrite your "dailies". I suggest making 5 "life categories" for yourself to organize your dailies by. For instance: Work, Family, Pets, Home, Fun.
< You'll notice that in the center of the picture, there's 5 rectangles extending downwards from he top. This is a good opportunity to track your daily progress in each of your 5 life categories. You can color in a portion of one of the rectangles to represent an hour spent in that category. >
(4) Decide how you'll use the picture to track your routine progress on a daily basis, by using your daily list.
< You'll notice that there's a wheel with 24 segments on the left. You could fill in a segment of the wheel for every productive hour passed, or you could break your day down into 12 chores and fill in two segments per chore completed. For added flexibility, there's also 24 circles corresponding to each wheel segment - so you can use the wheel as a time tracker, and a chore tracker if you wanted. >
(5) Decide how you'll use the picture to track your unique progress for this particular day you're planning. You'll notice that there's a stair-stepping bar graph divided into 10 segments - that's great if you want to have 10 tasks to complete that day. The triangle below it is good for coloring in abstract progress, maybe as you work your way through a difficult project. (You could also just write in numbers that correspond to tasks on your list, and cross each one out as you finish those tasks). There's two little spheres orbiting around the time wheel - those are great for representing tasks you might consider to be very unique, or important. Each sphere has a bit of visual complexity (bottom and top half, or the encasing around the sphere) - those things could be colored in to show partial progress, or they could stand for completely different tasks.
----------
I recommend that as you use this picture, you chart your happiness throughout the day. It's satisfying to visually see whether or not you're making any progress in tackling your depression. That's why I draw a little "AM, PM" section on the lower right hand side of the picture. Happiness can be graphed from 0 to 10 at a couple of points throughout the day. I drew these little graphs so they're actually mirror images of one another. So if you look at the 0 to 10 PM, it's upside-down. To read your happiness progress on it, you would rotate the sheet. I think it's a cool visual effect and adds a bit of tactile interest, but if you don't like the style, just color in the 10s and 0s on the graph with nice solid circles, and them as you please. With these graphs, the time of day would be roughly indicated by the x axis, and the happiness scale by the y (in case that wasn't clear).
Above that, there's three horizontal sections indicating morning, noon, and night. Each segment has 8 sections within it. You could color these in to indicate successful hours passed, use them to indicate when you ate (roughly speaking), or if you used different colors, you could even represent when you had a meal, when you exercised, etc.
Well - that's about it! Since you're printing these three to a page, you'll be able to see your progress over a three day period! (That is, unless you cut them out and stick them in your wallet).
Remember - the picture is drawn to grow and change with you. It's not designed to guilt trip you. If the picture fails to satisfy your objectives - well maybe you temporarily need to set yourself smaller, easier goals. It's not about what you accomplish. It's about how you feel about accomplishing it (the happiness graph), and it's about comparative progress.
Always fill out your score at the top - even if you had a rough day. I like to write in why my score was low, if it was. (Ie: I was really tired today. Didn't sleep last night). That helps to give some validity as to why this particular day didn't work out for you.
Here's my last piece of advice though! Rate yourself based on the progress of yesterday, not on a static scale of your personal expectations. If yesterday, you did nothing, and today, you were amazing - then you deserve a 100%. If yesterday, you did amazing, and today, you were pretty lazy...well maybe you deserve a 75%.
By looking at the progress you're making, visually seeing the beauty of what you have done, feeling the sense of accomplishment as you fill in the sections you've earned, and view your happiness steadily increase - you should be able to inspire yourself to get up, get moving, and consistently work towards making each day a work of art!
-----
You asked me what I do when I'm depressed. That's how I do it. First, I wallow. Then, I get disgusted with myself. Then I make an action plan - and I make a beautiful visual creation to help me gamify it. Then I fill myself with happy expectations and small inner praising for each task completed, and I do my best to manipulate my hormones into working for me, not against me.
