1) For many things I want to do, I don’t know exactly how valuable they are.
Imagine a student who wants to learn programming—they may have an idea about “average programmer salary”, but they don’t know whether they are going to be better or worse than the average, and how much time will it take them to get there. How should they calculate a value of a lesson? Does learning two programming languages have twice as high value as one of them? Or is the second one superfluous because at any given time they are likely to only use one? Or is the second one an insurance against scenarios where “something goes wrong with one specific programming language”? Generally, learning any new skill has this kind of problems.
2) What about “maintenance” tasks? Things that need to be done regularly, such as washing dishes or vacuuming one’s room, that don’t bring something new, but rather avoid losing deterioration of one’s state.
In some situation, the maintenance cost could be subtracted from the things that requires the maintenance. For example, if washing the dishes is 10 points, and having a food cooked is 100 points, I should actually only give myself 90 points when cooking lunch. (The math is same, but either we can imagine it as “cooking = food + dirty dishes = 100 + (-10) = 90”, or we could treat washing the dishes as the last stage of the “cooking lunch” project.) But for things like vacuuming the room, it is difficult to point out what exactly creates the debt. Maybe we could simplify some things as “daily costs of living (at given quality)”, which means that every morning I would get automatically a few negative points for things getting worse without maintenance.
I think a better term to use is to “prioritize” rather than gamify.
I also think there are better ways to do tasks when taking into account different situations. Making a more simple meal might mean less effort and less time washing your dishes. Using disposable ones is also possible if you value your time more than the ever increasing total money spent on it. I’d argue that daily tasks are the most easiest to optimize as you will inevitably get more practice and you’ll see how can stuff be done better.
Sounds exciting, but I see at least two problems:
1) For many things I want to do, I don’t know exactly how valuable they are.
Imagine a student who wants to learn programming—they may have an idea about “average programmer salary”, but they don’t know whether they are going to be better or worse than the average, and how much time will it take them to get there. How should they calculate a value of a lesson? Does learning two programming languages have twice as high value as one of them? Or is the second one superfluous because at any given time they are likely to only use one? Or is the second one an insurance against scenarios where “something goes wrong with one specific programming language”? Generally, learning any new skill has this kind of problems.
2) What about “maintenance” tasks? Things that need to be done regularly, such as washing dishes or vacuuming one’s room, that don’t bring something new, but rather avoid losing deterioration of one’s state.
In some situation, the maintenance cost could be subtracted from the things that requires the maintenance. For example, if washing the dishes is 10 points, and having a food cooked is 100 points, I should actually only give myself 90 points when cooking lunch. (The math is same, but either we can imagine it as “cooking = food + dirty dishes = 100 + (-10) = 90”, or we could treat washing the dishes as the last stage of the “cooking lunch” project.) But for things like vacuuming the room, it is difficult to point out what exactly creates the debt. Maybe we could simplify some things as “daily costs of living (at given quality)”, which means that every morning I would get automatically a few negative points for things getting worse without maintenance.
I think a better term to use is to “prioritize” rather than gamify.
I also think there are better ways to do tasks when taking into account different situations. Making a more simple meal might mean less effort and less time washing your dishes. Using disposable ones is also possible if you value your time more than the ever increasing total money spent on it. I’d argue that daily tasks are the most easiest to optimize as you will inevitably get more practice and you’ll see how can stuff be done better.