| Walking the Fine Line Between Challenging Yourself Enough and Taking All the Fun Out of It 
Categories: Gamification480 words1.8 min read

Walking the Fine Line Between Challenging Yourself Enough and Taking All the Fun Out of It 

Walking the Fine Line Between Challenging Yourself Enough and Taking All the Fun Out of It 

When you are seeking to incentivize yourself and others to get more done, it’s important to set everything up in a realistic way. You want to create realistic goals, doable daily tasks, and set yourself up for success. 

Don’t put roadblocks in your way by setting the goal post so high it’s impossible or so low that progress is too slow. 

When you start with SMART goals, it’ll be a lot easier to ensure that you don’t set yourself up for failure or make it too easy. Smart goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. If you take the time to do that, it means you must understand how your goals measure up in every way.

* Specific – Describe in genuine terms what the result or impact is of what you want to accomplish.

* Measurable – Ensure that you can measure it because that’s the only way you can really determine if it’s working or not. 

* Attainable – You’ll need to know what it takes to get to where you want to go. For example, if you want to make six figures reselling clothing on Poshmark.com, what does that take, and are you able to do what it takes?

* Realistic – Is it even possible for you or anyone to do? If it’s not possible, don’t set the goal. For example, anytime you say, “If I win the lottery, or if I make $100,000, then …”, that is a sign that it’s not a realistic goal.

* Timely – This just means that you need to set a time limit when you want to see the result or impact or deliverable. Your timeframe needs to be realistic because you can’t do a 10-hour job in one day and call that timely or realistic. If you set the time limit too far away, you may also never get it done. Make your deadlines challenging but not hard – flexible, but not open-ended. 

To challenge yourself and gamify your goals so that you don’t take the fun out of everything and make it harder on yourself, you’ll want to add one additional thing to the SMART goal-setting technique. That is setting up small milestones at the point you’re measuring results where you can give rewards and prizes that incentivize you to keep going.

When you set up your goals and objectives using the SMART technique, it builds in a 360-degree view of what you want to accomplish and how you’re going to do it. The process enables you to use tracking methods to ensure that you’re on the right track. This means that when goals are set properly, you can tweak and adjust to find your sweet spot in terms of how you challenge yourself.  

Categories:Gamification

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