New self improvement scheme

When things gets complicated, they tend to fail. It is especially true in my self motivated attempt at pushing myself to my limits. My well thought out reward/punishment scheme finally fell apart in April when things got too busy and I don’t have time each day to update the numerous details of all the activities I have to do. I’ve bumped into a plateau that every other self improvement specialists must have encountered. Too much planning.

So, to keep it simple, I decided to use Twitter for that. It’s very easy and simple to understand. Simply put, there will be 3 items that I have to achieve by a certain date. One long term goal, one medium and one short. Out of the 3, one will be related to my profession while the other 2 are general life improvement items. If I achieve something by a certain date, I get a reward, if not I get a punishment.

Rewards needs to be small and to the point. I failed at my previous attempt because I have a tendency to build up lots of points so I can go for the big items. This way, I force myself to reward right away. So far I have these as rewards:

Short: Starbucks Coffee

Medium: Movie

Long: $50 spending money on presents

Punishment is hard to think up. It has to be something I hate doing and will be too lazy to improve on while at the same time, not required for the normal functioning of life (else they’d just be one of the items on the twitter list). Being motivated to improve, it is actually hard to find fitting punishments. These are my punishments:

Short: Practice typing for 1 hour

Medium: Play tam tam for 2 hours

Long: Put $50 into RRSP