Tag: habit creation

Gamify your life for more daily wins.

Like many avid self-improvers, I’m trying to grow into the best version of myself. This means adherence to healthy and productive habits. Which is hard. Because there are a lot of fun things on this planet that are unhealthy and counterproductive. Like sweet tea and turtle sundaes.

But I have found that if you gamify your life, your life becomes more fun and you get better results. This doesn’t simply mean playing more games. It means turning everything into a game. Like Milton Bradley. Or compulsive gamblers.

My life games start when my alarm first goes off in the morning. And they don’t stop until I am in bed again at night. These games help me feel like I am scoring points and winning all day long. It’s an easy way to make the actions that I know I should take each day more enjoyable and rewarding.

Fill Your Day With Games

Your work is packed with opportunities to win every day. But so is your home life, your social life, your health, your wealth, and your general self-improvement activities.

Consider the following ideas to get started.

You can gamify your sleep. Get to bed by a certain time, and you win. Wake up at a pre-set time and you win. Get a set number of hours of total sleep and you win. Don’t get kicked out of bed for snoring, and you win.

You can make weight loss a competition. Or make weight maintenance a game. I track my weight every day with the Happy Scale app, which gives me the opportunity for daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and even lifetime wins. Plus, you get bonus wins when you look in the mirror. And every time you can button your pants.

You can make your good habits a game.  Stacking days in a row of consistently completing your good habits at work or at home is a win. There are so many good habits worth developing and maintaining that there are hundreds of ways to win every day. Like Lotto games say. (But don’t play Lotto. Bet on yourself.)

You can turn meeting new people into a game. Gamifying people-meeting incentivizes you to expand your circle of friends and grow your network. Give yourself points for every new person you know by name. Having more friends expands your opportunities, supports your mental health, and gives you more phone-a-friend options if you are ever a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Grow-Your-Net Worth is a game that pays you a cash prize. And increases your peace of mind. Definitely track and stack your assets. And if they hate, then let them hate and watch the money pile up.

I play the Drink-A-Glass-Of-Water-First-Thing-Every-Morning Game. And I am crushing it at this game. Proper hydration is key to great health and human performance. So play this drinking game every morning.

I gamify annual adventures with friends. Gamifying it makes scheduling our time together a priority.

I just gamified a bench pressing competition with myself. You can read about that here.

I play the Start-Each-Day-With-A-Smile game. And I’m happier as a result.

I try to be the first one to apologize when I get into a quarrel with a friend or loved one. I also compete to keep the word quarrel in use, since it has been decreasing in popularity for like 500 years.

I track my time on my phone each week and try to keep it below a winning standard.

I try to get to church every Sunday during Advent and Lent to win the Advent and Lent games.

By turning the positive behaviors you want to see from yourself into a game, they become fun to-dos. You can quantify your positive actions. Through small actions, you can put points on the board every day. Which means you can always count the good things you did, even on bad days.  

Key Takeaway

You win at life in small ways, every day. By gamifying the actions, habits and behaviors you value, you are giving yourself a fun and easy way to track them, and stack them. It’s a great way to make yourself feel like a winner every day. It’s builds confidence and positive self talk.  And it creates a clear and easy guide that you can use to measure your life. So start gamifying your life today. You can play every day. And like the state lottery commission, you can add new games every day to keep your interest up and to encourage the behaviors you value most.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media. And consider subscribing to Adam’s Good Newsletter.

Wake Up And Take Control Of Your Day with This Simple Habit.

When I was a kid, I had a small, square alarm clock.

It was very simple.

It had a traditional analog face, with an hour hand and a minute hand. (They actually looked more like arms than hands. But I think that ship has sailed.)

On the back of the clock, there were two simple dials. One set the time. The other set the alarm.

On top, there was a single, mushroom-shaped button. (Which grew in the dark.)

You pulled the plastic mushroom up to set it.

You pushed it down to turn it off.

That’s all there was to it.

But what was really important about my alarm clock was its location, location, location.

I didn’t set it on my nightstand like normal alarmists.

I placed it on top of my dresser on the other side of the room.

Every morning when the alarm clock sounded, I hopped out of bed and hustled across the room to turn it off.

And just like that, I was up and out of bed for the day.

I never hit the non-existent snooze button.

I didn’t crawl back in bed.

I started my day.

The Adam Albrecht Approach to Alarm Clocking has trained me to get up and start my day the moment my alarm sounds for the rest of my life.

Go Ahead, Make Your Day.

By training yourself to start the day when your alarm goes off, every day, you train yourself to take control of your life.

Today, I have stacked a series of beneficial habits into my morning routine.

Here’s The First Hour+ Of My Day:

When my alarm goes off, I turn it off.

Then I put a big smile on my face for 10 seconds.

I get out of bed.

I make my half of the bed.

I go to the bathroom and drink a tall glass of water I set out the night before. (Which means today’s success began yesterday.)

I weigh myself. (The daily feedback helps me keep my weight between the ditches.)

I enter my weight in my Happy Scale app.

Then I sit down at my desk in my home office to write.

I write from 6:10am until 7 or 7:30am.

As a result of this morning routine, I wake up, smile, hydrate, track my weight, and produce new creative work every morning.

Not because I decide to each day.

But because I decided to once, 10 years ago.

By 7am, I am rolling. I have won the first hour of the day. And I roll into the rest of the day, and my next habit stacks, with momentum.

But it all starts with the way I respond to my alarm clock.

Key Takeaway

Get on top of your day before your day gets on top of you. When you control how you start each day, it helps you take control of your entire day. And when you are in control of your days, you are in control of your life. So get up when your alarm goes off. Set your alarm on the other side of the room if you have to. Put a big smile on your face. And go win the day.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.And consider subscribing to Adam’s Good Newsletter.

I have finally developed a skill I was never good at.

There are some things that I am good at. And other things I am not good at at all. (Like folding fitted sheets and stopping myself from thinking, ‘That’s what she said…’ a thousand times a day.)

One of the things I haven’t been good at at work is entering my time into our time-tracking software at the end of each day. (I also wasn’t good at avoiding that at-at thing in the previous sentence.)

To be clear, I keep a detailed to-do list each day that lists my activities. Plus, I schedule my daily activities on my calendar, which provides a detailed log of my time. So I have records of how I spent each day for great reference. In fact, when archaeologists someday discover my notebooks, they will have a strong understanding of how I spent my days and could enter my time for me. But I expect it will be too late for us to invoice that time.

Still, I have never liked walking away from the office without completing my time entry for that day. Yet the tight demands on my schedule often meant that I did anyway.

One of my goals for 2025 was to enter my detailed time each day on the day I did the work. So, I added something new and simple to my long list of habits.

On my daily Success List (what you might call a to-do list, and what Scooby Doo might call a Scooby To-Doo list), I have added a line that says, Enter Time in Harvest. Harvest is The Weaponry’s time-tracking software.

As we started February, I noticed something interesting. I entered my time each day for the entire month of January.

The key to my behavior change was simply writing Enter Time in Harvest on my daily Success List.

I love crossing things off my list. It makes me feel accomplished. Having a list keeps me productive and focuses my time on my most important activities throughout the day. Because I already had a strong list-making and list-crossing-off habit established, I simply utilized my habit of doing the things on my daily list daily to create this valuable new habit.

The key was right in front of me all along. Or should I say, write in front of me?

Bonus: Another valuable thing I added to my daily Success List last year was the line No Social Media Before Lunch. This prevented me from falling down social media rabbit holes and wasting precious time during the golden morning hours of productivity. Again, because I love crossing things off my list, I avoided the socials between 9 am and whenever I stopped for lunch. As a result, I got more important work done each day.

Key Takeaway

You are a product of your habits. If you use a daily to-do list or Success List, try adding the behaviors you want to modify to your list. Remember, those may be behaviors you want to add or eliminate. By writing them on your daily activity guide and crossing the actions off your list at the end of the day, you may discover the easiest way to get the results you want.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.