Reward yourself for frequent Weekly Reviews
It's a funny thing really. When you lead other people, you tend to use a lot of encouragement and rewards, to inspire the right behaviour. But when you lead yourself, these motivational tricks often gets replaced with tough self-discipline & harsh selfblame, when failing to reach goals set for oneself.Well... half a year ago, I decided to stop selfblaming and start self-rewarding instead. The reward-scheme was invented to get me into a better Weekly Review habit. The Weekly Review part of the Getting Things Done system is notoriously difficult to implement, probably because sitting down for 2-3 hours and reviewing your system, is a very big time-investment, and thus difficult to find the time for. At the time, my weekly review was more of a Montly Review actually, which meant the GTD-system simply wasn't working.So what to do?My idea was to find a very special reward, that I could gradually earn by making weekly reviews. (I have described the concept in detail in danish here)So for every finished weekly review, I would gain a little cash to get the special reward. The amount set was 100 dkr (19 US $).
The Extra Special RewardI chose a costly Coffee Grinder as the reward for all my efforts. The Rancilio Rocky was a wonderful piece of machinery, that I had wanted for a long long time. But it was so expensive, that I had never really seriously considered buying it. It just seemed too extravagant to spend 2400 dkr (445 US $) on a thing to grind coffee. 2400 dkr buys a lot of coffee! So as a special reward is was perfect!
- It was expensive
- It was something I had an irrational desire to get
- It wasn't something I would buy otherwise
For a every weekly review completed, I would take a physical 100 kroner-bill, and put it in an envelope. And with this routine in place I started the proces of saving up for the remarkable coffee grinder. This was the 1st of december 2006.33 Weeks went bySlowly the envelope got fatter, as a nice bundle of bills accumulated. It really was a nice experience for someone prone to swiping the credit card and getting instant gratification.Here is a diagram of my progress:
So I was able to get 24 weekly reviews needed to buy the Rocky in 33 weeks. This was quite a wonderfull success. I went from 1 montly review on average, to 3 monthly reviews on average. A threefold increase!Trophee Aquired!So now I have it! I bought it yesterday taking my envelope to the gourmet coffee store. It felt great taking out a fat bundle of bills, handing it over and getting the heavy cardbox box with the Rancilio logo on it.So now I have it in my kitchen next to the espresso machine. And every time I look at it, I get this happy sensation inside. It's not the normal feeling of: "I bought something expensive that I thought would change my life, but now I'm a little disappointed." It's a feeling of triumph!I is like looking at a treasured trophee. It is my prize for a great achievement!And now it's time to sit down with a cuppa, and figuring out the next big extra special reward, that my, ever more frequent, weekly reviews, will get me. I'm considering the following:
- A set of podspeakers for my Ipod?
- A B&O earset2 for my Nokia E61i?
- A vintage Parker 51 fountain pen?
What to choose? Any Ideas?- Jens Poder
Technorati Tags: GTD, weekly_review, productivity, lifehack
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[...] With this, I can tick off, every time I perform one of the new routines. This means I can keep up giving myself little rewards for completing weekly reviews. [...]
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[...] put a little scoreboard in my organizer, to mark with an x, when I have done one these routines. Because I still want to get rewards for making weekly reviews [...]