For a few months now, I've been engaged in something I call the Points Project. It started as a way for me to keep myself accountable to actually doing something with my days in the summer, but it's morphed into a general metric of becoming, I guess.
Here's how it works. I made a little spreadsheet in Google Docs. It looks something like this:
I figured out the goals of my life. Not in the sense of what I want to accomplish as much as who I want to be. There's a place for emotional development, spiritual development, physical development, whatever. Then, I made up some activities and disciplines that need to be present in my life in order to grow in that area. Each one gets a point score, depending on how difficult it is or how tricky it is to motivate me to do that item.
The system is not perfect. I've tweaked it a number of times to try to be more accurate or more motivating. I've added quite a few activities that are worthy of my time and interest so that, hopefully, my points help me track my growth as a person.
The trouble I've had lately is that I've not had a reason to get more points. I'm far too sensible for it to be some kind of monetary goal. I've got enough of those as it is without figuring out some kind of payout for points. My new strategy is to post my scores online. Hopefully, that will motivate me to keep getting my scores back into the 200 or 300 range, rather than the abysmal 100ish I've been getting lately...
So join me as I spam my blog and twitter feed with a contest that I'm playing with myself.
3 comments:
So, how do you work on keeping a well rounded score? That is, not heavy loading say, physical points, but neglecting other points? Or is that not as important as work towards any of the overarching goals?
I'm not sure it's super important. I think it's important to develop some sense of scale between the different goals, but I'm not sure how "balanced" it has to be. To me, it all comes down to how accurate do you want to make it. If you want your physical goals to completely override the others, then make them worth more points. For me, my spiritual development takes high priority, so it's easy to get a quick 100 points right off that bat at the start of the day if I do all my daily disciplines.
Interesting. I could see that working. For me, if I were to implement such a system, I'm afraid the convenience of the task would outweigh the point value. You know? Like even if taking a walk is higher in points than reading a chapter of something, if it's more convenient to read something I'll go for convenience, and still feel like I've accomplished something, even if it might be slacking a bit. Unless I possibly set a minimum total goal for the day.
I can see how the general idea could be altered as suits the needs and desires of the individual though.
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