Be Clear About Your Goals When You Turn Medium Into Fun Games

If you concentrate on uncontrollable goals, you throw yourself out of your fun game.

The previous article I wrote about turning writing and publishing on Medium into fun games was about enjoying the breaks in publishing here, as during the holiday season. I referred to those breaks as cooldown phases well-known in sports and games.

In that story, I recommended not to worry if you notice yourself watching your stats and earnings. In fact, I even mentioned that it might be fun and enlightening, especially during a cooldown phase.

But at the end of the article, I also recommended looking less at the stats and earnings during an active phase, that is, while writing and publishing here.

There is another important aspect to the stats and earnings:

If you connect your goals to the numbers in your stories stats and Medium Partner Program earnings, you will not really turn your time on Medium into fun games. Instead, you will be chasing a fantasy, a Fata Morgana.

Here is why.

Gameful feedback systems and their definition

The true secret to enjoying your writing and publishing game on Medium as a fun game or a game platform lies in the definition of a gameful feedback system. The stats and earnings pages Medium provides for your stories do look very much like gameful feedback systems. And they are.

But you need to know how to read and understand them. And before that, you need to be clear about your goals.

Here is the definition of feedback systems in games by the hugely successful and world-known game designer Jane McGonigal that gives a great clue what achievable goals really are:

“The feedback system tells players how close they are to achieving the goal. It can take the form of points, levels, a score, or a progress bar. Or, in its most basic form, the feedback system can be as simple as the players’ knowledge of an objective outcome: ‘The game is over when . . .’ Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it provides motivation to keep playing.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken

Let’s repeat the last sentence:

“Real-time feedback serves as a promise to the players that the goal is definitely achievable, and it provides motivation to keep playing.”

The emphasis above is replicated from Jane McGonigal’s book, and I am sure you can see why.

What does a SMART goal really mean?

Goals in games are truly SMART, which means that they are specific, measurable, achievable (or attainable), relevant, and time-bound.

And most of all, they are controllable. There is a promise that you can achieve it with your skills and abilities.

However, Medium doesn’t promise the numbers of views, reads, claps, followers, and the size of your earnings.

So if you bind your goals to them, you will not turn your writing and publishing time on Medium into fun games. Instead, you will be chasing a fantasy, which your mind pushes further like a Fata Morgana as soon as you achieve that number of views, reads, claps, followers, and earnings you set for yourself as a goal initially.

To turn your time on Medium into a joyful game, you have to start with defining a controllable goal. As the designer of your self-motivational games, the one you can guarantee yourself, as the player, to achieve.

And this goal is the number of articles you want to publish in a week and month or your daily and weekly word count.

Thus, when you check your stats and earnings, don’t forget to observe the left column. In fact, make that check to be your last one, deliberately. The left column shows you your stack of articles you created this month. They are your lottery tickets on winning the viral-article lottery on Medium. And the number of these tickets is your actual goal in turning your writing and publishing time on Medium into fun games.

And when you set that goal for yourself, don’t forget to consult your player. My player, me, did her best to publish five and even more stories a week, but at some point, she didn’t enjoy the time here anymore and felt stressed.

I continued writing, but this publishing race wasn’t fun anymore. It didn’t feel like a game. So now, the compromise between the ambitious designer/manager and the player/writer in me is to set the goal to publish two articles every week on Medium. For now, it is both doable and requires some effort on my part to achieve.

“The research proves what gamers already know: within the limits of our own endurance, we would rather work hard than be entertained.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken

In parallel to Medium, I taste other games like marketing my books and my other work almost daily on social media and my blog, and weekly through a newsletter. These other projects and activity games are different now from what I did before. And because of my love for books, I also started being active on Goodreads again.

A wish

We can’t play the same game all the time. Even the most devoted players of the massively multiplayer online games leave their beloved games to do something else during the day.

Thus, having SMART goals means adjusting them to doable and controllable as you go and as they fit in the colorful cocktail of your situation, feelings, wishes, preferences, and what you have available right now and right where and how you are.

And most of all, achieving them should feel like a win in a game.

I wish that for you and your goals both on Medium and anywhere else from all my heart! And best of all is that you and I, as our own self-motivational game designers have all the tools necessary to make that possible for ourselves.

Enjoy!

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed reading the story above, then in addition to it and the ones referred to above, you might also like these:

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