I also wanted to add that so far this system has produced some measurable results. Instead of buying lunch yesterday and today, I attended a seminar I've been meaning to go to for a couple months (they were serving free lunch!), so not only did I get free food, I also learned about Hedgehog signaling, which is something my lab actually studies. I also made lunch last night for today. So that's a savings of abut $10 right there!
I also also wanted to say that I keep tweaking the requirements and the points values. I had to push the "leave for work" time back from 7:45 to 7:40 because 7:45 created unpredictable work arrival times due to the structure of the shuttle schedules... I also had to change "play with cat" from >20 minutes to ~5 minutes, because the cat actually gets bored after about 2 minutes and 20 minutes was impossible to achieve. And on the reward side, I originally had $20 worth of yarn valued at 20 points, but once I realized I was going to be earning 30-40 points per week I bumped that up to 75, and then added in some bigger ticket items for larger quantities of points to encourage myself to save them instead of spending them as I get them.
And in case anyone is curious, WoW is neither a way to earn points nor a way to spend them. I'm trying to keep it completely separate from the entire game, since it's not something I want to encourage myself to do more of, and it's not something I want to charge myself points for (because I'd just play anyway, whether I had points or not, and then my game would be broken).
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Date: 2011-01-28 02:11 pm (UTC)From:I also also wanted to say that I keep tweaking the requirements and the points values. I had to push the "leave for work" time back from 7:45 to 7:40 because 7:45 created unpredictable work arrival times due to the structure of the shuttle schedules...
I also had to change "play with cat" from >20 minutes to ~5 minutes, because the cat actually gets bored after about 2 minutes and 20 minutes was impossible to achieve.
And on the reward side, I originally had $20 worth of yarn valued at 20 points, but once I realized I was going to be earning 30-40 points per week I bumped that up to 75, and then added in some bigger ticket items for larger quantities of points to encourage myself to save them instead of spending them as I get them.
And in case anyone is curious, WoW is neither a way to earn points nor a way to spend them. I'm trying to keep it completely separate from the entire game, since it's not something I want to encourage myself to do more of, and it's not something I want to charge myself points for (because I'd just play anyway, whether I had points or not, and then my game would be broken).