Gamedev productivity tip #4
Tackling behaviour change
Breaking crappy habits is hard. Making new, productive habits stick is even harder. If you have no strats, chances are you’ll fall back into the old, bad habits. Let’s make it a little easier to make productive changes last.
Motivational energy
Doing work costs energy. We only have a limited amount of energy each day (modified by your general health, happiness, stress levels, etc). No energy = the dreaded burnout and zero motivation to change behaviour. The energy cost of a task is modified by how habitual it is, how difficult it is and how fun it is. Following are three strats that take these energy costs into consideration to increase the chances of making new behaviours stick - gradual change, scheduling and making considerations for the difficulty of a task.
Try to change too many behaviours at once and you’re going to max out your daily energy quota, burn yourself out and probably fall back on old habits. So make only one or two changes at a time, ya dingus! Keep the new changes going for a few weeks until they become habitual and then use that freed up energy to take on more changes. Bam. You just upped your chances of the new behaviour sticking. Great job.
Scheduling
Hard mode: only relying on your memory to try and remember to do a new behaviour. Every time you forget to do it, the chance of failure increases. Every time you’re tired and can’t motivate yourself to do it, the chance of failure increases.
Easy mode: schedule a specific daily/weekly time for the task! Forgetting to do it is a lot harder - it’s in your diary. Didn’t do it one day? No problem - it will pop back up at its next allotted time. This has the added benefit of making you feel naughty for not doing the task at its scheduled time, which is a good motivator (presuming you’re lawful good like me).
A personal example: to counteract all the burgers I eat, I decided to add a dance workout sesh to my daily schedule at 12pm. If I miss it, so be it - I know that my scheduled burger nullifying dance time will be back tomorrow! I’ve done this enough now that it’s habit and I don’t have to push myself to boogie. I love scheduling. My life is scheduled. That may sound restrictive, but it’s okay - I’ve scheduled in free time.
When choosing when to schedule in your new behaviour, consider its difficulty and energy cost. If the task you want to do is difficult and going to require a lot of motivation, schedule it in when you know you’ll have the juice to do it. For e.g. I tend to have more energy in the first half of the day so I schedule in costly tasks then. You can also help maintain your energy levels and sanity by sandwiching difficult tasks with easier or more rewarding tasks. It’s much easier to do a hard thing if you’ve just done a fun thing and it’s much easier to finish the hard thing when you know a fun thing is coming up next.
To improve your chances of making permanent behaviour change:
Only change one or two things at a time!
Schedule hard things at times when you’ve got lots of energy!
Schedule fun things before and after a hard thing to keep morale up!
This is the part of a series of productivity tips I’m writing relating to game development. I’m a hardcore productivity nerd and will only share advice that I have tested and currently use as part of my daily routine. Feel free to leave any comments, criticism or your own personal advice.
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