Gamify Your Creativity: Turn Boring Tasks into Fun Adventures!

Create Art Podcast Commentary Game on part of the Make Fun a Habit series. Hello friend. This is Timothy Keemel Bryan, your head instigator for Create Art podcast where I use my over 30 years of experience in the arts and education world to help you tame your inner critic and create more more than you consume.

So we're continuing on with our Make Fun of Habit series from Mike Brennan, who runs the Creative Chats podcast. And I actually got a chance to interview him on my other podcast, which is called Find a Podcast about and you can find that at findapodcast About XYZ now, why did I choose to do this series? Well, he came out with a book called Make Fun a Habit and what it is.

It's a 30 day workbook that you can use to do just what it says, make fun a habit and you can do it for your creative practice, no matter what creative practice you choose to use. Now, the links will be in the show notes there for you so you don't need to worry about busting out a pen or paper or anything like that. But let me tell you how the workbook is set up. First, what Mike does is he tells you a story about whatever topic he's covering for that chapter.

And the chapters are broken up into 30 chapters, which is about 30 days, depending on what month you're in. So he'll tell a story and then what he'll do is he'll give you questions to think about, give you action items to think about doing to put that fun back into your creative habit. And then he'll give you some tips on how to do it. So let's go ahead with this chapter, which is chapter 29. We are almost done with it. I know it's honestly quite a quick read.

And if you do it one a day, that month is going to go by so fast for you and you're going to have so many cool ideas and you're going to have a great time with it.

But in this chapter, we're talking about gamification or game on. So Mike tells a story of when he had to, you know, when he was cleaning up around he was a kid and cleaning up around the house and had to, you know, clean up some trash and all that and how exciting that is. Yeah, I know most of us hated doing chores when we were kids. I'm one of those. And even as an adult, I look at the chores, I'm looking at my lawn right now going, oh my God, I got to cut that.

And yesterday I record these on Sunday mornings. But yesterday I'm looking at, you know, the trash and the cat litter and the cat food and all the stuff needs to be done around the house. And, you know, it's. It's my day off, and I'm looking at all these chores and going, but if we change our mindset and make it a game now, there's plenty of games out there that we do on our phones. If you have a gaming system.

I grew up in the age of Atari 2600, so I've always had a gaming system around here somewhere. But if we turn these things into a game, these tasks that we don't like, then we can really get through them. And it's not just for our creative practice. Let's think about different ways or. And Mike tells us different ways we can use this. So let's say you're in college or you're still going to school or doing some sort of trade school or something like that. You can start off with education.

And, you know, what you could do with that is, you know, every time you do a half hour or hour of studying, you get a point or you get some award or some sort of badge that you create for yourself. And that can make that monotonous task of studying for a test or actually taking the test or, you know, completing a course, make that into a game for yourself. You can also use it in the workplace.

So I'm sure we all have jobs that we're, you know, unless you're independently wealthy, you're probably working and, you know, maybe you get a task done or maybe you survive a meeting or something like that and you give yourself a gold star or you track it on some sort of chart. Well, see if you can't, you know, bump up the point. See if you can't improve from what you did last week, last month, last year. You can also use it with your health and fitness. I started doing some.

Some gym work and some pool work late last year. In 2024, in 2025, I need to get back to it. Yes, I do. But I have the. My smartwatch that tracks all my stuff. So what I try to do is, you know, get more steps in every day or do more laps in the pool or lift more weights or burn more calories. It's really easy to do that these days. And then one thing that I found really interesting is customer engagement. Now, I don't think of you as a customer. I think of you as a listener.

But, you know, if I can improve the engagement that I have with you, Answer more emails, answer more questions, reach out to more people, connect people together, because these are things that, you know, I can do for you. And then I can track that and go, okay, so this month I did this many emails. This month I did this many episodes. I want to do more for next month, I want to do more for the next six months. I want to do more for a year.

So that way you can, you know, kind of make it into a game for yourself and get that high score, whatever that high score is for you. All right, we're going to go into Mike's questions for us here, and question number one is what games did you enjoy as a kid? Well, one of the games that I really enjoyed was playing army with our neighborhood kids. We lived, well, it's not really a suburb of Chicago, but we lived in Rockford, Illinois.

And we had all these woods around us and we would make model airplanes, usually of World War II aircraft, and we would fly those around in our hands and we'd also play army, you know, with, you know, guns and all that kind of good stuff. And, you know, those are the, you know, kind of outdoor games that we played. But then, like I said earlier, I grew up with Atari 2600, so we would play those games in the summertime.

You know, we go into our garage because we had it set up and I don't know why we did it this way, but we had a TV set up in the garage with a couple of chairs and our Atari 2600 and we would play that for hours on end and waste the summer. Honestly, it was a waste of summer. But those are things that I really remember fondly as a kid. The next question is, what games do you currently enjoy again?

I'm a console kid, so I have my PlayStation 4 and play, you know, I'm still playing Army, I play Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, and I also play Diablo 4, currently here in 2025. And you know, those are games that I enjoy playing. I'm not, unfortunately, I'm not huge on board games and my kids are. So that's something that I need to work on and get more involved in. And then the last question is, what tasks that you find boring can you gamify?

What would. What would this look like? So, and this is a weird thing I really like researching, but it's also really time consuming and boring. So for me and fixing up websites, you know, it just, it's ness. It's a necessary evil. So maybe if I just go, okay, I'll do a little bit this day, a little bit that day, and then do more and more and more and then track what I've done. That would be a way that I could gamify it. I don't know. What are you thinking about doing?

All right, so the action item is pretty easy on this one. And he says to host a game night with friends, families, or co workers and talk about the aspects of the games that you enjoy, and then brainstorm how you can take those game elements and apply them to work or tasks that you don't enjoy and make a friendly competition out of it and see who can get the best results and then set a time frame and make award. Make an award show for completion to be celebrated.

So that's really bringing in other people. That's bringing in outside people into your creative space and seeing what they're doing. And maybe you get an idea of what this person is doing over here, that person's doing over there to, you know, make your creative process that much more fun. All right, so the tips that he gives us. First one is identify the goal of gamification. Are you trying to do something better? You know, are you trying to speed up your process?

Are you trying to get better at your process? What is the goal of this gamification? Is it just to get through the monotonous tasks? That's. That's a goal right there. So why not that the next thing is choose the right game elements. Not. You know, so when you're looking at these different games, board games, card games, dice games, whatever it is, I'm just thinking about Yahtzee. Yahtzee is on my mind for some reason.

But choose the elements from those games that you can use when you gamify the tasks that you find boring in your process. The next tip is make the game elements meaningful. So, you know, if the only thing that you play is checkers, how is that going to be helpful? The elements of checkers, how is that going to be helpful to you? You know, the goal is to take all the other pieces or. Yeah, basically with checkers is the goal is to take all the other pieces.

But how does that help you and what you're trying to do? Maybe it's a thing where it's a adventure game and you're trying to get as much experience as you can. That would be more in line with what I'm looking for. Maybe you're looking for something different.

The next tip is to track progress and reward users. So make sure you're tracking this stuff for yourself. However, it's Gotta be for you. Just make sure that you're tracking it. Because at the end of the day or at the end of the year, when you look back at it and you see how much you've actually done, when you're in the middle of it, you don't feel like you're doing a whole lot. But when you look after a year of the work that you've done.

Case in point, Friday night, I was looking for a poem on my website, and it shocked me how many episodes of Create Art Podcast are out there. I was like, wow, that you know it. When I'm doing an episode, I don't think about all the episodes that I've already done, all the people that I've talked to. But when you, you know, pull back your focus and you go, wow, I have done a lot, it really makes you good. You know, it really makes it hard for that imposter syndrome to.

To have any basis in reality. So make sure you're tracking your progress with it. And then the last tip is, of course, keep it fun. I mean, don't. Don't stress on this tracking. Don't stress on what elements are going to work, what elements are not going to work. The big thing, and you know the title of the book is Make Fun a habit, the important word in there is fun. So whatever you end up doing for your gamification of, you know, your menial or boring tasks, make it fun.

And with games, games are fun. Games are meant to be fun. You know, the people that make games, they want you to keep on playing them. And, you know, some games, that's their whole thing is to keep you in the game and for you not to get back into the real, real world. So whatever, whatever thing you choose, just go ahead and make it fun for yourself. All right? That is all the time I have for you here today. I want to thank you so much for listening to this episode of Create Art Podcast.

I hope you found something out of it. I know I certainly did. Especially that part where Mike was talking about customer interaction. I think that's something that I haven't really done that much, and that's something that I know I want to do more. I want to track that, I want to gamify that. I want to see if I can get more reactions, some more engagement. So that's what you're going to see me doing here in the next next few episodes. If you'd like to reach out to me, please do.

Timothyreateartpodcast.com if you have show ideas or if you want to appear as a guest, that's the best way to get a hold of me. And if you want to share this with somebody, by all means, your podcast app should have some sort of share button. I'd really appreciate it. And you never know who you're going to help out with. Maybe this episode isn't for you, but maybe it is and you're like, man, yeah, that's a great idea. I can't wait to share this with the world. By all means.

I'm not going to bite your head off, I promise. Share it with the world. I definitely appreciate it. And the people that you share with are definitely going to appreciate it as well. All right, two things I want to talk to you about here as we close out.

One is I have started a business in 2025. It's called TKB Podcast Studio and that's where I help my clients lead to the noise with quiet professionalism. So if you're thinking about starting up a podcast, head on over to the website tkbpodcaststudio.com and let's see what I can do for you. The other thing, and I mentioned it earlier, is I run another podcast called Find a Podcast about. You can find that one at findapodcast about xyz.

And that's where I review podcasts that I personally find binge worthy. And a lot of times the podcast host will be on there to be interviewed. What am I doing there? Well, basically I'm trying to help you outsmart the algorithm and find your next binge worthy podcast. So meet me over there at findapodcast about xyz. All right, I need to get on with my day as I'm recording it.

This one, it's Father's Day, so I got to get ready for, you know, my, my socks and ties and all that kind of stuff that comes with Father's Day. But I to let you get on with your day as well. So go out there, tame your inner critic, Create more than you consume. Go out there, have some fun, play a game and make some art for somebody you love. Yourself. I'll talk to you real soon.