Gamify Your Life Tasks
posted in Personal Success, Self Perception |I had a set back this morning – in the big scheme of things it is only minor. Simply another $1200 for no real gain, but a necessary evil. Yet for some reason it has gutted me – it frustrates me. Why? Is it because it reinforces a self-sabotaging perspective that everything I do is a struggle. Even when it shouldn’t be. Is it really that EVERYTHING is a struggle, or does it just seem that way? Am I giving too much weight to the things that don’t go smoothly, and not enough focus on those which do? Am I simply attracting more struggle because I sort of now expect it.
I decided to ‘get out of state’ by going for a quick walk and planning how I was going to overcome another struggle I am having with formatting some Kindle ebooks – it seems that Amazon is doing everything it can to incorporate all the whizz bang multi media elements into Kindle books, but one cannot simply format up headings and lists in a way that is pleasing to the eye. This is not uncommon in the world of technology – everybody wants to provide the super smart features at the expense of the basics. So I have had to pull back my desire to give the reader a thoroughly pleasant reading experience and give them unformatted bullet lists and headings that cannot be linked to via the device controls. Hardly an ideal product but one that Amazon had unfortunately deemed acceptable.
During my walk I decided to come back to my office and invest 2 hours in attempting to get at least one Kindle book published to a reasonable standard. Yet, I got back here with my gut in a knot, not wanting to take on another problem for the day that was going to deliver a less than satisfying outcome. So I decided to play one game of FreeCell. During the game, I realised that things were not going to work out and had to back out of a few steps and try again. It struck me that I could calmly [and even enjoyably] tolerate the struggle and multiple attempts during a game, yet for work purposes I would feel anxious and tend towards procrastination.
How could I approach these tasks in the same way I do my game. After all, I have agreed with myself that I will surrender and let life happen through me and not to me as outlined in my previous post. Just saying it allowed all the anxiety to drop away. I reframed my 2 hour tasks as an ‘attempt’ to resolve the Kindle issue, rather than expect any outcome. This may sound like I am accepting failure – but for me at the moment, failure is not trying. By giving it an honest attempt to get a good outcome in two hours I am succeeding by overcoming my anxiety and my procrastination and learning to attack problems with a different focus. I am gamifying the task. It’s all a matter of perception and finding a state where the energy flows.
Wish me luck !