Results for days 4, 5, 6, 7 of the round May 2017 of the 5 Minute Perseverance Game (5MPG): 7, 7, 4, and 8 points out of 11 possible for each day.
Results Total for week 1: 45 points out of 77 possible (more than 50%).
Results for days 8 and 9: 9 and 10 points out of 11 possible for each day.
Before I started posting and reporting on my progress in the “5 Minute Perseverance Game”, I was sharing this game with a group of friends, which is called “Procrastination Breakers’ Club.”
While reporting on the progress in different of my projects, I invited the members to share their thoughts on the game as well as what has happened to them while they played the game.
One year ago, I took for May 2016 a project that I thought would be annoying to finish. “I am going to prepare my novelette “Nothing Is As It Seems” for publishing,” I wrote in the comments to that month’s game round.
I had this idea that formatting and preparing a book for publication is complicated and too tedious. I wanted to have finished it already, so each step in doing it was an effort. And since I made the experience that the Perseverance Game can help me make progress with even the least favorite tasks, so I took this project into the game.
With time I forgot that the project was supposed not to be fun. Here is what I wrote on the last day of the May 2016 round, on May 31, “ I’ve spent more time than 5 minutes [on the project] today. I guess I was caught in the fun. 😉 … This process of formatting was probably the most relaxing of all four paperbacks (+ 3 pdfs) I have formatted [so far]. 🙂 I love this game. I even have now a game book to “play” other projects. I found the word for what we are doing here. We gamify our activities. 😉 I received a newsletter from a software provider for app consolidation with a link to a blog post about gamification. Can you imagine this? Just as I am launching a book about this. 😀 This kind of coincidences is simply amazing!“ [The book I mentioned being launched was the “5 Minute Perseverance Game”.]
So, the project I thought not to be fun became fun. I even “got caught in the fun.”
As it looks like, this little perseverance game can not only help us make time (broken into small bits) for and progress with the projects we like, but it can also ignite fun for the tasks we think we don’t like.
What is your opinion? Do you think “fun” has an absolute value? Or in other words, are you of the opinion that if one thing is fun to do than it is always fun doing? Or the other things that are not fun are they always not fun? Or can the way we feel about certain things and projects change with time?
On the picture above: A couple of years ago, my son didn’t go anywhere near zip-lines eying them very skeptically. That has changed now, and last week he had big difficulties leaving this one.
What is this blog series about? You can find this out in its first blog post called “5 Minute Perseverance Game – Moving my Favorite Game to my Writing Blog”.
Copyright © 2017 by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels