Hello, hello! What time is it? Time to resist the urge to obnoxiously insert link to that infamous High School Musical music video … It’s Experiment Chronicles time!

If you’re just joining us, I’m the resident guinea pig of College Fashion land. I test out different productivity methods, new ways to insert more play into your life (because play is good), and try to be a healthier person.

Table of Contents

-Combining KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) exercise and lazy meditation

Work: 1-3-5 To-Do Lists

Set-Up

The 1-3-5 To-Do List is a format created by Alex Cavoulacos, The Muse’s Founder and COO. Essentially, you limit your daily to-do list to 9 items in order to accomplish:

• 1 big thing
• 3 medium things
• 5 small things

If you liked the idea of gamifying your schoolwork but found the method too complicated, doing 1-3-5 combined with rewards is a simplified version.

Daily points are still involved. Backed by the idea behind Habit Judo and the psychology behind random variable reinforcement, I used a random number generator to spit out a number between (1-9, 10-90) depending on how many tasks I’d accomplished that day. 

EX: I finish 7 tasks then the random generator would spit a number between 7-70. 

I’d add those daily points on top of my semester cumulative total, goal being to reach 10,000 points by the end of the semester. Like Habit Judo’s judo belt system where you level up at certain point levels, I gave myself target levels to hit every 1,000 points. I didn’t reward myself for every level I hit, unlike my previous gamification system (see: Play below). For fun, I gave the levels names correlating to shows/books I enjoy (e.g. Level 4: huntress to correspond with RWBY).