How I'm hacking my developer brain to do marketing
I know I should do more marketing. But marketing tasks are the worst: uncertain payoff, uncertain definition, maybe even some risk of rejection.
It's no wonder I end up adding just one more feature or starting yet another side-project. But no more! I've played enough Universal Paperclips to understand my brain can be tricked into doing pointless stuff if only some (also pointless) number goes up.
So that's what I do now. In the spirit of Paperclips I assign Yomi to each of my tasks and when I complete a task I add the amount to my weekly Yomi. Yay!
How to come up with good Yomi amounts?
Keeping Yomi between 100 and 2000 feels about right. You want to have to work hard for higher amounts but should be able to increase your weekly score significantly. It's all about the dopamine hit.
Here is how I do it: I assign each task an expected payoff between 1 and 10. Then I multiply that value by 126 and round to the next 10. This hides my thinking behind the estimated benefit and I believe that "contact 3 agencies" is really worth 1070 Yomi.
Secret trick
If you make sure even equally valuable tasks get a slightly different Yomi amount, you can trick yourself into not thinking about which one of those tasks to pick first.
Why use Yomi and not expected dollars?
When I look at the list of tasks and see concrete dollar amounts, I start to question those estimates every single time I look at the list. Direct path to procrastination.
Has anyone tried something similar? Also there must be people who know more about game design than me. How can I improve that system?
As someone who has played way, way, way too much Universal Paperclips, I think this is a great approach. I haven't gone this far - I usually try to tie what I'm doing to some real-world number. For example, I just started working on SEO this week, and the first two numbers that I'm incrementing are the number of backlinks that point into my site, geo.codes[0], and increase the number of pages that target informational or transactional keywords. Since it's an API, I know that I can build links by doing a few things: adding libraries for different programming languages and publishing them to the usual central repositories, writing informational posts for programmers and putting them onto The Usual Places, etc.
If I get into a place where my tasks don't directly relate to numbers that are under my control, I will definitely think about this Yomi approach. I think it's really smart!
[0] Just before submission, I just realized that it looks like I'm trying to artificially pump the number here, but I'm guessing that user-generated keywords don't really help
Hey Ben that is actually super smart!
Marketing is super hard for our developer/maker brain we all tend to spend too much time building!
I created a marketing-focused community for makers (named Marketing4Makers ) just for that!
The idea is to help each others, to make ourselves accountable and to grow our business! I'll be glad to have your feedback about it!
This is the best idea I've seen on gamification of the self-rewarding feeling of getting tasks done. This is such an awesome hack to procrastination... just awesome.
I'm still stuck on the gratification of crossing the items on my to-do list :)
That’s a really cool idea!
I also find it tough to force myself to do marketing most of the time, but I can see how an arbitrary point system might help with motivation. It reminds me of a point system my parents had for getting us kids weeding the garden.
Do you end up doing anything with your Yomi? Do you treat yourself if you’ve reached a certain amount?
Awesome question! I haven't so far and I wonder if it's more effective without the real-life reward but I might experiment. Have you as kids gotten any rewards for the points? And have the points themselves motivated you at all back then?
Ultimately of course I'll have to get stores to accept my Yomi...