Points!

I've been thinking about a neat idea for a couple days that I think I'm going to implement. I've previously written about how important it is to have lots of different things aligned with your goals, both high-level and low-level. Well, this is an idea of the decidedly low-level cheap trick variety. I've always been disgusted and fascinated by how easy it is to motivate yourself with a simple numeric score. That's part of the motivation behind the monotonic stats idea, but I think I can do even better.

What I want to do is make a system where you can give yourself arbitrary points. You have a big number associated with you. It only ever goes up, and it goes up by prescribed amounts that you define. So you can say "taking out the garbage" is 10 points, and every time you take out the garbage you click that button and your score goes up by 10. I'm also toying with the idea of having levels at certain point milestones. The idea is that, while the points are arbitrary, they don't have to be meaningless, and it should be as easy as possible to define meaning on top of them.

I find something really fascinating about these kinds of systems that, in some sense, have very little to say. They're not designed to take a strong stance about how you use them or what you use them for, but they are designed to express a particular set of ideas or tools that might be useful, and encourage you to use them. I'm hopeful that these set of tools will turn out to be useful for motivation or, at least, fun.