Dec 14
Gaming the System
I read this long but pretty insightful post from Rands about using games to solve your dire problems. I think games are a great way to get things done, especially when you can't come up with another ounce of motivation. I make my own little games in the office to hit my goals sometimes. The geekier and/or more competitive your group is, the more effective games are, obviously. My wife and I are extremely competitive and, by nature, poor housekeepers (although we try our best). Finally, we got to our "grim circumstance" where there was just too much clutter around the house. Our solution? A game. The rules were as follows:- Put a "price sticker" on any item that we believed was not where it belonged. (we did this individually so that the net result was up to both of our standards)
- Assign a point value (1-5) to the item depending on how difficult we believed it would be to put it away, and write the point value on the sticker. (we had some things that didn't seem to have any real home in our house)
- Any time you put away something, take off the sticker and post it on the scoreboard under our name.
- Most points wins
Originally we were going to have a prize for the winner, like maybe we could go buy something we wanted within a budget, or we could pick a restaurant to go to or something. As it turned out, we didn't even need a prize to motivate us - just the competition was enough. I'm not sure what that says about my wife and I and our relationship, but at least we ended up with a clean house :)
