Two years ago I had a bad habit of waking up late for work.
Every morning was the same — I’d start my work shift, do the mundane work, and count the hours until I could sign off. In the evenings, I played video games.
The next day, the cycle would repeat.
Nowadays I still play a lot of video games but I also wake up early and study or write every day before my 9–5 starts. My behaviors changed which led to a new job with a 40% pay rise and moving into an apartment that I didn’t have to share with strangers. Life didn’t get easier, it got busier, but in the best way possible.
I’m going to use video games as an analogy for how I study consistently because thinking this way makes studying fun.
Hopefully what I share will help you too.
Selecting a Goal
In most video games we have a main mission or quest and level up along the way.
We also have side quests. As we play through them, we improve and unlock new skills. This makes it easier to progress through the game. The main quest is like our goal. Our sidequests are like the milestones we reach on the journey towards our main goal. When we complete side quests we’re rewarded with new skills and perks.
They provide another hit of dopamine and keep us engaged.
Last year, my goal was to become a cloud engineer. The only way to get the outcome I wanted was to learn new skills and apply them to the kind of project a cloud engineer would do. The subgoals were the stages of the project, such as learning programming, APIs, and databases to name a few. Whenever I learned something new and applied it, I unlocked a new skill.
What are your own goals?
Getting Triggered
When we fail or die in that addictive game we’re playing, it can be triggering.
It makes us want to rage quit. But it also makes us want to try again, because we know we can do better. It’s not motivation that keeps us playing. It’s because the game is pushing our buttons. We hate to lose.
So we keep trying until we succeed.
Sharing a house with 5 strangers was enough to keep me in a constant state of being triggered.
I didn’t want to schedule time to cook because the kitchen was often overcrowded. Or check if the living room was empty so I could chill with my date. Every time I thought about earning more money to afford my own apartment, it pushed my buttons. It reminded me to go study so I could earn more money and leave.
Escape the Noise
Before developing my new habits, I had just moved to a new town.
I didn’t know anyone. This gave me a lot of time to reflect on my plans for the future. Some might have found it lonely but I saw it as an opportunity to pursue my goals without distraction. Because I was often alone, boredom took over. It allowed me to focus and it became my greatest ally.
My rituals changed. I went from playing video games late into the night to going to bed early so I could study and hit the gym before my work shift began.
Shifting Your Perspective
Working full-time makes it challenging to study.
We get home from work, sink into the couch, open our favorite social app, and try to distract ourselves from the responsibilities of life. We know these habits won’t bring us any closer to our goal, but we’ve had a long day at work so it feels like we deserve this time to unwind.
The truth is, no amount of self-help advice will cure this type of mindset. This is the part where we have to make the daily decision to get up, sit in that chair, and study.
But there are things we can do to become more disciplined.
To develop the habit of studying, I began to use a time-blocking app. I time-blocked my whole morning — wake up at 6 AM, shower for 15 minutes, brush my teeth for 5, etc... At some point, I would fit a 45–60 minute study session into this schedule. Recently, I’ve also started using James Clear’s Atomic Habits app to work towards my goal of writing online.
Measure Your Progress
Tracking my progress over time reminded me that I was leveling up.
It was a way to battle the days
- That I felt deflated.
- That felt like I was making no progress.
- That felt like everything I was studying was leaving my brain faster than it entered.
In video games, we see our progress in the form of skill points and unlocked perks. So finding a way to measure my progress in my studies felt equally useful.
It was visual feedback that reminded me how far I was from achieving my goal. It reminded me that I’m improving, reducing the risk of giving up.
Using the Notion app, I documented every new skill I learned toward becoming a cloud engineer. I compared everything I learned to the ‘requirements’ and the ‘nice to have’ sections of job descriptions until I had covered everything needed.
Final Comments
Gamification is a big part of what helps me to consistently learn new things. Even with a full-time job. Tracking goals, measuring progress, and blocking out time makes things so much easier.
Figuring out our goals isn’t always easy. Sometimes we have to sit with our thoughts for a while to figure out what we want. But when we discover our goal, developing these positive habits makes it so much easier to achieve the outcome we want.
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