The Happy Human Game

Well, 2017 is officially in the bag, which means my time spreadsheet for the year is all finished. Final count: average 66 hours worked per week for the past year. Highest was 96.5 hours in one week (the Tornado Alley Tour) and the lowest was 41.5 (the week before Thanksgiving, for some reason).
Y’all, I am not proud of that. I spent a whole lot of that time being wired to the moon and miserable, and not following through on promises I made to people I really care about. I AM proud of the things I accomplished in that time (more on that in the next couple of days) – but I do not want to die of stress and fat. 

So I’m going to start doing things differently – and maybe this will be useful for some of you guys too. This year, instead of making resolutions, I made a new spreadsheet. I’m calling it my Happy Human game, since that's what I'm trying to become. I listed all the stuff I want to make a habit of in 2018, and assigned each one a points value. There’s 365 points possible – funny how that worked out – and for January, I want to see if I can get 50 points a day. I’ll see about ratcheting that up to 100 in February if it goes well, and maybe tinker with point values as certain things get easier.

Anyway, if you want to try making your own Happy Human game, you can download mine and mess with it. (Please do change the entries around; the things there are the things I personally tend to struggle with, and I'm sure yours will be different.) Here is the link!

You might also like to check out Habitica, if this kind of thing sounds appealing - it's a similar idea, but rendered as an actual, playable game, and I've heard good things about it.

Regardless: good luck out there, guys. The year won't stay pristine for long, but I've loved seeing all the can-do-itude on my feed today, and I am so looking forward to meeting your bad-ass future-self!