ITPeed

Choose one of the sunday sermons from The School of Life (24 to choose from). I’d like you to write a reaction to the video as a comment on the blog post called The School of Life Sunday Sermons. Tell us why you chose that particular sunday sermon, what you learned, what, if anything, you heard that you’d consider incorporating into a system of self-care as an idea, a method, a design constraint, etc. Include the video’s title and link.

I chose to watch Jane McGonigal’s talk on productivity. I chose her because I’m a gamer and have been a fan of her promotion and defense against the stereotype of gaming. Productivity has also been something I was always felt lacking in or like I wasn’t doing enough of it. The feeling bred a lot of negative emotions and I found myself easily overwhelmed by the massive to do lists I was making.

Jane points out in her sermon that making to do lists inherently makes one unhappy and outlines the 4 key qualities we need to lead a happy life: PERMA, which stands for Positive Emotion, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. By channeling our To Do lists into a PERMA fashion, we may start doing things that make us happier. I do wonder though where necessary boring tasks like calling Time Warner for the billionth time fit under this model.

She also went over how games cover PERMA, how we are starving for PERMA qualities like Engagement, Accomplishment, and etc and that’s why so many individuals turn to games. I was thinking specifically of my brother at this point. Recently, I had been frustrated with him because all I ever see him do is play games, specifically, Dota. It made me mad to see him waste his life away so unproductively. Games consume his life specifically because he’s not engaged with school work. He also hasn’t been a strong student, much to the disappointment of my parents, which I think makes him feel unaccomplished, giving him more reason to turn to games.

I was actually thinking of staging a mini-intervention with the other half of this week’s assignment, but I just can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but I want to start with small satisfying tasks that would slowly motivate you to take bigger steps. (Eg. taking a multi-vitamin)

I don’t think game mechanics works well for motivation honestly, so despite being a gamer and wanting to be a more productive person, I think I’ll stick meeting the requirements for BJ Fogg’s model instead.

This video is about monitoring breathing to monitor self-awareness. Though the idea seemed interesting to me, I felt a little underwhelmed by their findings. Yoga, for example, would have been an interesting thing to study. It’s all about breathing and awareness and clarity of the mind. I would like to be able to apply that exercise to all aspects of my life, but I felt like the approach they took, using your friends to keep track of your breathing, just seems more mentally taxing than alleviating. I think there are other more passive means of measuring and being aware of your breathing. The speaker doesn’t really go into the details of the experiment, but I would have liked to hear more about how they measure it, and how they define ‘awareness.’ I’m also curious about further applications of this idea.

I found, like many others in the class that the first half of this reading was easy to get through, the second half much harder. (To be fair, I was also lying down. Maybe if I had been moving around I might have absorbed more.) It started to drag out towards the end though when he began listing his points. I remember liking behaviorism when I first learned about it. The idea that we can boil the very intangible essence of ourselves into a simple explanation fascinated me.
However, I find it hard to compare self-experimentation with other experiments like a double-blind experiment. I just consider self-experimentation to be closer to case-studies, studies where one can draw a very loose conclusion that adds to a larger picture, but not one to be applied to a population. But, I do think in large large numbers, the data would begin to show reliable trends that would benefit the everyone.
The reading also made me think on just how there is a lack of a standard in self-experimentation because it’s usually inherently biased to the experimenter who also happens to be the subject. Just knowing you are partaking in an experiment can leave a significant change in your results.
So it seems there still a gap today between studies conducted in a lab and one conducted at home, but like the author was saying, perhaps the two can supplement and lend more meaning to each other.

Having taken psychology in my undergrad, this model definitely felt like another variation other models I’ve learned. It was helpful for me to draw it out following along, even though it was straightforward and common sensical.

But one thing I didn’t think that was as intuitive was the idea of a trigger. Thinking back to my summer internship at an ad agency, I can now think of many many instances of triggers. The whole model of (motivation + ability) + trigger = persuation made me think about an example in our Design for Unicef Class.

Uganda is one the countries in the world that has very successfully reduced their HIV infected population by embracing their campaigns (motivation), granting access to protection and sex-ed (ability) and with campaigns, knowledge, and safe sex, their numbers shot down from 30% of the population to 5%.

In context of self-documentation, this reading makes me think that, at least in my experience, my biggest hindrance in self-documentation lies in the ability to do so. It’s consuming, and figuring out qualitative parameters and measures is often challenging. I’m curious to see how this behavior model will influence my future designs, especially in self-quantification.