GSD Tool Kit - Gamification

Every so often I want to share an experience, a tip, and a tool that I have used to help my day-to-day life. 

For several months now I have been using the habit and goal-tracking app Finch to help track smaller, achievable goals with a big impact. The gamification of the system is based on completing tasks to gain energy to “go on an adventure” with adorable text prompts and avatar growth. Your bird pal has an encouraging voice to help motivate and comfort you through daily life. There is a mood tracker, a recap system to show your weekly growth, emergency mental grounding exercises, simple stretches, soundscapes for meditation, and all tasks can lead up to overarching journeys for improvements you want to see. The general tasks available are great and usually suit your needs. The customizable options are also great and tend to be just flexible enough for what you need. 

Here is my home screen UI that shows my avatar and the room that can be customized by unlocking rainbow stones and different goal milestones.

Here are all of my journeys! As you can see, I’ve had some for over 200 plus days, and some I’ve only had for a bit.

My experience: Overall VERY positive

Since October of last year, the app has greatly upped its usage by providing monthly campaigns for themed avatar room decorations, clothing, and micro pets! I think this has greatly increased my daily usage and remembering to participate for the day. Also, it has a very cute widget on my phone that displays prompts to regularly check-in without the use of notification reminders. Those can be a lot, and I’m glad they can be adjusted to what works for you (low or high stimulation needs). 

Another overwhelmingly positive experience I have had is sending encouragement to your friends through the app. For anyone else who has the app, there is an easy way to send some quick motivation and positive reinforcement through your avatars to one another. It is also rewarded by giving you energy! 

Some things to note, I found the app to be better for reminder-type tasks instead of overarching goal tasks. For instance: setting a reminder to drink water at 7 AM when I know I’m already awake and should chug a damn glass instead of being on my phone was more helpful than setting a “do yoga” goal. 

The 7 AM water reminder set a better tone and more ability to build off of to feel like progress. A general “do yoga” was very non-committal and frankly was ignored probably 75% of the time until I felt like it. That felt more like a chore to complete and wasn’t very fun sitting on my screen unattended. 

“But Yebba, you could have just done it - what’s the big deal!?” - Sure, I absolutely could have. But on days when I’m just having goals to get through the day and survive - the last thing on my mind is extra activity to get there. Maybe it will be more useful when I’m not in a slump - but modifying my goals to have it be available as an option is more helpful than a reminder. 

Example of building on a goal that is going well: I added a counter to encourage more water while I did other tasks in the morning and would come back to check those off. I ended up wanting to see the counter of 4 gone by the time I was going to lunch knowing I at minimum had 4 glasses of water so far that day. Sets a good pace for the day!

Here is a screen cap of how the April monthly rewards look. Every month since October they have added these and I think it has increased my usage of the app by a lot.

An example of the motivational messages you receive most times when you check the app and also the mood tracker prompts. In the morning it is “motivated” and in the evening it asks how “satisfied” you were about the day.

Doing some of the exercises on there to set intentions for the day, prompts for reflection, or provide a vent space was very helpful. It was nice to have a space that could have data collected from it (keyword usage) and having it served up as an option made me take it more often than ignoring those feelings or glossing over the task. 

My main caution is that this shouldn’t get too hyperspecific in unique goals and you shouldn’t overuse the task system for every single thing in your life. It just has the potential to get unwieldy if you take too much time overengineering things. You’ll probably need a few weeks to figure out what best works for you in your operating method - so give it time when you download it and ACTUALLY use it. There are plenty of built-in options to start and try to see if you like it - start there.

TLDR Tips: 

• Use Finch for task tracking up to big goals and set them in a positive, achievable way. Don’t make too many goals of not doing things. “Don’t be on your phone for 6 hours a day” vs. “Met my screentime goal - <6 hours”. 

• Be ready to adjust the tasks and goals if you're not meeting them regularly! These are GOALS, not rules. 

• Make them work for you and not feel like they’re too constricting or defined. For instance: “Do 10 minutes of activity” vs “Do a yoga session”

• Have negotiable tasks you can add on the days you do them separate from the achievable goal tasks you can build off of. Having ones you can add instead of staring at you not completed day after day is more encouraging. 

• Build off of what you can handle! Examples: use reminders to do goals earlier in the day, add counters for the number of times to complete tasks, and upgrade from once a week to many days. 

• Use the writing and reflection prompts on top of the easy checklist ones. They provide some cool insights in your weekly reviews. 

Overall takeaways: If you are looking for ways to better position positive reinforcement throughout your day and have fun reminders for mundane things - this app is a really fun choice. It has been the least clinical yet the most helpful tool to create habits and track my moods about myself or how I’m doing. Feels like a lot less pressure too than traditional gamified platforms or actual games that promote these types of services. 

Be sure to download it today and encourage someone in your life to also have it to GSD together!