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Hack your life: gamify your goals

Hack your life: gamify your goals

How to make life more fun and achieve your goals

Jennifer Chou
January 20, 2023

“Just one more chapter…then I can stop studying.”

Have you been in this situation before?

5 minutes studying feels like 5 hours.

But as soon as you’re done, you reward yourself by watching a TV show…

Where 5 hours feels like 5 minutes.

Why is it so easy to have fun, but so hard to study?

Over the last few months, I tested ways to make achieving my goals more fun. I even turned into someone who liked studying 😱

Here’s the exact step-by-step process I used so you can do the same. You can find everything I learned below - learning #3 is my favourite.

Research
Prioritise
Create a hypothesis
Plan and run experiment
Analyse results (I learned data analysis for this)

Psst: curious about experimentation + optimizing your life? Check out the new Growth/Digital Marketing program I created - the modules on experimentation are my favourite.

How to make life more fun: experiment insights

I learned and adapted my habits to improve my life - keep reading for my key takeaways.

After implementing my learnings, I:

Consistently reached my learning goals daily
Felt excited to do what I’d considered “chores” before
Became more aware of what makes me happy - and how to optimise it

Here’s how you can apply my learnings.

Insight 1: laziness can keep you accountable

Here are my bad habits:

Too much junk food at night
Stayed in bed going on my phone for hours
Procrastinated working towards my learning goals

Here’s how I overcame them by being lazy:

Put junk food downstairs (so I’d be too lazy to walk all the way there to get it)
Started time tracking (so I’d be too lazy to keep stopping/starting the timer - since I have to switch the task to “phone time” every time)
Locked distracting apps/websites and only kept Duolingo and habit-tracking ones (so I’d be too lazy to manually unlock and reinstall other apps)

All of these were decisions I made once that paid dividends in the long run.

Insight 2: understand what motivates you

This is what I hated doing:

Chores (folding laundry, cooking)
Going to the gym
Manual work

This is what I loved doing:

Learning all about languages, psychology, history, tech
Reading horror novels
Listening to music

I combined them to make my life more enjoyable:

Did chores while listening to podcasts and courses
Listened to audiobooks while at the gym - now it’s my “me time” to destress
Danced to music while doing manual work

Combining tasks I disliked with my hobbies made me love what I do.

Insight 3: track your success

Seeing all the checkboxes made me more motivated to keep going because I didn’t want to break my streak.

(Psst: that’s why we’re giving out a free learning habit checklist with every purchase until Saturday, Jan 21!)

Here’s what happened before I tracked my goals:

I avoided working towards my goals until the end of the year
I had no idea if I was making progress
I felt stuck in my life

Here’s what happened after:

I became more motivated to continue my good habits and get rid of my bad ones
I knew exactly what I needed to do to reach my goals
I was proud of myself for learning skills like data analysis to improve my life

AKA before and after taking EntryLevel’s Data Analyst program.

Someone finally said it 😄
Personally, I noticed that I get better at analysis when I started tracking data about my finance, health, work commit, meeting, etc and how they measure the goals I set for my self.
So when I do same for companies it does not feel like work.
— Damilola Ogundipe (@damilolameanbiz)
Jan 13, 2023