I consider pretty much my entire life to be this one convoluted “work in progress” that slowly but surely moves towards completion. My blog post today is going to be very brief and to the point, as I have just spent the last sixteen hours creating the general pages of this WordPress site and trying to narrow down and define the handful of interests that warrant the most attention.
I use a program to help me keep track of the things I want to work on. It’s an Android-based app, called Life-RPG and within this little app, I can create little ‘quest-lines’ that, when completed, pay off in little gems. It generates experience points based on how complicated a project/quest is to complete, the anxiety level involved with completing the task, and the urgency that the task must be completed in. Deadlines can be set but are not mandatory.
What I like about it, though, is that I can make different ‘skills’ that are then tied into the quests as I make them. For example, I have Artistic Expression, Creativity, Programming, Game Design, and Persistence listed as some of my individual skills. I can assign one or more skills to a quest, and if I complete the quest, I gain XP that can raise skills or raise my overall character level.
I use it because real life doesn’t have a ding or fanfare when I successfully visit the dentist, edit three chapters of my book (for the eighth time), or put in a dozen obstacles in my mini golf game. For some of us, we need to hear that fanfare once in a while.
Plus, it’s a decent tool to help me remember what exactly I wanted to work on next for whatever my many projects are. Each project has a number of sub-category ‘quests’ and the app can actually pick out which one I should work on next, based on how high an urgency I assigned it. It also tracks my ‘recharge time’ when I should be asleep instead of blogging like I am now.
So if you’re a gamer (like me) and have difficulty remembering what you wanted to work on next when you have three dozen things to do all at the same time, I cannot recommend this little app enough. Live-RPG.