Motivation is key for finishing your game
Creating small wins to keep you going
Regardless of if you’re working alone or with a team, keeping motivation high is key to actually completing your game. This becomes even more true the longer you spend on the project. Inevitably as the project goes on you start to lose motivation. It can seem like you’re trudging through a tar-filled swamp. This isn’t really your fault, it’s just the way our brains work. You haven’t had a reward in a while.
To help me deal with motivation I try to plan my work around small wins. Even if I don’t actually get a cookie, I’ve found building this into my work has helped keep me going and keep me more motivated for the long haul. Let’s look at how you can do it too.
Build in Small Wins
When I say “small win”, what I mean is setting anything that I can set out to do and accomplish in a short period of time. I make that my number one focus and move towards it with as much gusto as I can manage. Sometimes that’s not much at all, but that’s not really an issue. You can make yourself finish something fast in the short term simply with discipline. Longer term it is incredibly difficult to continue that discipline. That’s why you make the win a small win.
So what I do, usually each night before I go to bed, is decide what my number one thing I want to accomplish the next day is. If it’s something on my games, I go ahead and mark that task in Linear as “in progress” because I’ve already mentally started it. For content or other ideas, I just mentally commit to it. These rarely change by the next morning.
During that next day my one thing is the focus for what I’m going to get done. I try to finish it as soon as possible to get that little dopamine hit for accomplishing something I set out to do. The “hell yeah” moment early in the day usually carries throughout the day and I’m generally more productive with greater motivation and more positive outlook. This also almost directly changed my usual late night self into an up-at-6 morning person, but we’ll skip that speech for today.
How you can get started
This is the great part. For you to get started with this it takes almost no effort on your part. If you commit to it you will see results.
Take a little bit of time, maybe even right now, to write down a few things you need to get done. Make these small enough that you can complete them tomorrow. Now pick one and commit. Get it done.
Something that helps many with this are those gamified tracking systems like you see on places like GitHub. You know the one.
As you can tell, I clearly don’t care about keeping the green check every day on GitHub. I use Azure DevOps for my game projects anyway. My Duolingo streak? That’s a different story. 1384 days and going strong.
You can use a tracking system like this and give yourself a check, maybe on a calendar, each day you hit your small win. Especially if you have a few days in a row going you really are not going to want to mess up your streak. If you’re like me though, just seeing your project move forward or that next newsletter article go out (ahem) will be enough of a reward.
Find of the Week
Since this week’s topic is more or less productivity, here’s another productivity hack I like to use: The Pomodoro Timer. That’s a fancy name for setting a time when you’re working.
The method roughly works in working blocks and break blocks. I’ll set a 25 minute working timer, then follow that with 5 minute break timers. Every four rounds I’ll take a longer, 15 minute break. Admittedly I don’t use this to focus, I use it to remind myself to take breaks. Especially if I’m focused I can work for hours without getting up and that’s terrible for your health.
The tool I use most often for this is the super simple, pomofocus.io, primarily because it has a pleasant bird chirping sound as an alarm option instead of a brain-splitting siren. Who wants a siren anyway?
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