Play to Your Pace

credit: Sonal Bains

I am working on some new offerings for 2013. The series will be called Play Your Way to (followed by whatever that month is helping you to achieve). The series will include things like Play Your Way to a Collaborative Writing Project, or Play Your Way to New Habits, or Play Your Way to Crowdfunding. The goal of this series is to help people learn how to gamify their activities in a highly customized way that “plays” on their strengths, making it easier to achieve goals and maintain flow states.

Today, as I was reflecting on how we work and how to design games, I thought about pacing. I have learned that I am an initiator. I have a lot of energy and drive at the beginning of a project. I am much better at short sprints of 2 weeks and at most 3 months. So I have designed the projects I work on to usually have these timelines. When I have longer projects of my own or with clients, I break them up into short time frames.

But I know other people who have very big long term goals. They work like a marathon runner instead of a sprinter. And I have so much admiration for the productivity people who are somewhere in between – they have 3-6 month or even yearly goals and they maintain a strong running stride at a pretty stable pace over the whole “race to completion.”

So, are you a sprinter? A marathoner? Or do you want a solid pace for a mid-length race? Does your attention on a goal stay, unwavering, over months or years? Then design your game for such long term play. Does your attention span last a day or a week and at best a month? Then design little sprints of activity.

Play to your pace.