Here is a picture of my life gamification project.
Some explanation: The nine papers are ordered by rows; starting with the top row. Each row represents one week, each column represents one day. I am doing this more than two months.
Different colors roughly correspond to different areas in my life (blue = relaxation, green = body health, orange = mental health, red = social life, yellow = long-term goals); but more precisely, I just had papers of five different colors, so I distributed my goals there by some pseudo-system. For example the top blue row is having enough sleep every day, to avoid sleep deprivation typically resulting from spending nights online. This is the self-improvement that worked best. The orange squares at the bottom are avoiding excessive internet. The green squares are mostly for avoiding sugar and exercising. As you see, most days, even most weeks I do not work on my long-term goals, which I would like to improve. But so far, partial improvement is also an improvement.
Looking at the statistics, the second week was the most difficult one. The initial enthusiams from the project wore off, and my internet procrastination habits kicked back forcefully. Otherwise it seems rather stable. I expected a slow improvement, but most of the gain is simply not repeating the second week later.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 15th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to everyone who contributes!
Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.