How to Start Gamifying Your Life

Becoming The Hero

“Nope, too slow.”

I stared at my best friend Ty in disbelief. How was it possible that I still didn’t do the obstacle course in a fast enough time? I jumped from the board to the piece of plywood and then onto the large rock as fast as I could. How could I not have done it fast enough? I kept trying and later ended up leaving with my parents in tears. I tried so hard but couldn’t make it.

Welcome back to Becoming The Hero.

I’m your DM, Justin Lewis.

Today, you and I will learn how to take the lessons from our heroes (real and fictional) to help us add more adventure to our lives, make worthwhile memories, and level up in meaningful ways.

The story I shared at the beginning of today’s show was a real experience from when I was 12. My friend and I had set up a makeshift obstacle course. We jumped from obstacle to obstacle in the dirt field in their backyard. I timed him and then he timed me. It was so much fun.

Nowadays, that would be considered exercise but back then it was just a game. Because it was a game we both were able to push each other and reach farther. We pushed our limits. That’s the point of today’s show. I want to share 5 ways that you can start gamifying your life to help you push your limits and have more fun. Also, sidenote, my friend was lying. When he timed me he lied about the time. I purposefully said I didn’t do it faster than me to see how fast I could go. I ended up going a good 7 seconds faster than him. That’s the power of gamification.

Pedometer

One of my recent gamifying tools has been a pedometer. Many of us live very sedentary lives unfortunately. I know I work online at home and so for 8 hours a day roughly, I’m on my tush in front of a screen. Obviously, we all have goals of improving our health and maybe shedding a few layers of triglycerides. For a lot of us we can get in the workouts, but improving our overall activity level is somewhat more difficult. Enter the pedometer. This isn’t any revolutionary tech. We’ve had this for a while, but it has become more advanced. Add a smart watch and you’ve got even more capability in your hands.

Let me tell you how I’m using it right now. You see, I’m not interested in massive change. In my estimation and knowing myself, I can burnout really easily. I’m looking more for long-term life-change. On the App that I have, it allows you to set a daily step goal. The step goals can be increased or decreased by 100. That’s important. So I started this a few weeks ago and set the step goal to 5,000. That’s important for me because based on the data in the app, prior to that, I was hitting or missing that number about 50% of the time. Ever week since I’ve hit my goal every day. Not just that, but I’ve also increased it gradually to 5200 steps per day. My idea is to gradually adjust it up but working on consistency over everything so as to help myself create a more all-around active life.

Screen Time Widget

The whole point of gamifying your life is making the worthwhile things you want to do more interesting and easy. The goal is to get you to live a more abundant, adventurous life, in the real world. That does mean that you’ll have to spend time in the real world. There are some of us who might have trouble with that. Screen time Widgets let you see how much time you’re spending where. The best way to fix things is to measure them distinctly. For example, My screen time says that I am down 43% from last week. Sweet… except for the fact that maybe I use my phone to do important things. But the app also allows you to see how much time is spent on which apps. From there you just identify the offending apps and then you lower the time on them.

Calorie Counter Apps

Another great way to help yourself gamify your life is by counting your calories with various calorie apps. There are tons of free ones out there. I do like MyPlate but there are so many out there. You...