When one wants to leap into an area of interest, but feels overwhelmed and unmotivated what can one do? Creative Gamification to the rescue!
For awhile, I have wanted to grow my skill set in several new areas. However, the areas felt vague and thus I wasn’t strongly motivated to leap in without being able to identify and measure my progress. Puzzled how to proceed, I created a document titled “Skills Progress Puzzle.” It has about twenty-five specific items that fall into six themes.
The trick now is to turn this into a motivational tool. A traditional skills percentages approach could work. For each skill, I could assign a percentage and then the overall theme percentage would reflect how the specific skills are rated.
Although that approach is a good foundation that helps things feel real, the downside is that it’s not visual and thus non-motivating.
Bubbles?
Although graph bars might work, I am leaning towards a filling-in-the-bubbles approach. Baby bubbles would work together to fill bigger bubbles. In a more organic way, I am filling myself up with the knowledge and experience I need to succeed.
So, bubbles it is. Now, I need a way to express the bubbles.
Items to Consider
- Must be digital
- Must be visually displayed as bubbles
- Must be accessible
After seeking amongst the tool options, excel seems the best choice for this data / visual approach. This leads me to using a circle within a circle approach. The inner circle represents what percentage has been learned so far for a theme and the outer circle is the end goal. Acronyms are used to keep things manageable. Looking at the result, each circle pair kind of reminds me of a frog egg.
Summary
So, there we have it! The circles help me know where to grow-in at a glance. The narrative theme of frog eggs helps along the natural good feeling that learning gives me in life. The percentages provide the data to support the intuitive gut feels about each theme. All that’s left to do now is to grow, grow, grow in knowledge and wisdom!
Update: A wise friend by the name of Dr. Wayne Buckhanan pointed out something. Once I conquer a theme, I have eaten the frog, Brian Tracy style. Clever!
