Steps

1. Cut and paste the following instructions to give to participants. You may read them out loud with everyone: According to a 2005 study by the Families and Work Institute, over 100 million Americans feel overworked and overwhelmed by all that they need to do. Every day we are bombarded by hundreds of demands on our time. There are never enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that we want. As a result, many people feel like their lives are spiraling out of control. They are falling further and further behind. Yet few of us are very talented at taking back control of our lives. Many people get to the end of the day and wonder where the time has gone. We spend many of our hours doing lots of small tasks, checking things off our “to do” lists, but we don’t feel satisfied that we have really accomplished anything of great importance. We will never have time to respond to every demand on our time. Instead, we must focus on what truly matters most – those things that bring the most meaning to our lives. We need to focus on what’s really important and in line with our deepest values. This game is meant to help you get beyond this syndrome. Indeed, this game rewards you for focusing on what matters most in your life. You are shooting for a perfect score of 2100 points every day. Here’s how this game works. First of all, you determine what are the 3 most important things in your life today. If you could accomplish nothing else, what would make the greatest difference? What three activities would have the greatest positive impact on your life, personally and/or professionally? Then you break down your most important goals into smaller steps. Note that each step should be a small but significant piece – something valuable that you can accomplish in 30 minutes or less. It should be something that you could see as a tangible sign of progress. Think to yourself: What is the next action that I could take to make progress towards my goal? Now you start keeping score. Each action step is worth 100 points. YOUR MOST IMPORTANT GOAL Step 1 – 100 points Step 2 – 100 points Step 3 – 100 points If you achieve all 3 of these steps, you get a bonus of 600 points at the end! (This is a huge incentive to finish these 3 important things. You get 900 points total. If you just do 3 of them, you only get 300 points, because you don’t get the final 100 points, nor the 600 point bonus.) YOUR 2nd MOST IMPORTANT GOAL Step 1 – 100 points Step 2 – 100 points Step 3 – 100 points If you achieve all 3 of these, you get a bonus of 400 points at the end. (Note that you cannot get the 400 points, if you haven’t gotten the 600 points. In other words, you must finish the most important goal completely before taking on the second most important goal! This is to make sure that you have your priorities straight. Otherwise it’s too easy to take on the less important things first, since the biggest, most important project is usually the scariest – the one that is most daunting and most likely to cause procrastination.) YOUR 3rd MOST IMPORTANT GOAL Step 1 – 100 points Step 2 – 100 points Step 3 – 100 points If you achieve all 3 of these, you get a bonus of 200 points at the end (Again, you cannot get the 200 point bonus unless you have received the 600 and 400 point bonuses.) The goal is to get a perfect score of 2100 points. That shows that you have had an incredibly productive day: You took 3 steps towards each of your 3 most important priorities! What’s even better is that this promotes life balance. This system only takes 4.5 hours of your day for the most important priorities. It leaves nearly 20 hours for everything else.
2. After reading this, you can see if anyone has questions. You are going to ask people to try this system out for at least a week, and come back to debrief after people have experimented with it.