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Dynamic Self-Improvement Method
About Method That Feels Like Playing a Game With Your Life
Wojciech Rembelski
October 28, 2023
Dynamic Methods in a self-improvement context are such methods where rules imposed on a person change as continuously as possible over time.
Compare it with Static Methods where a set of rules is rigid and doesn't change over time. Compare it with Lean Methods where a set of rules changes by leaps and bounds periodically (2 week sprint for small changes and 90 days for bigger changes of rules).
This continuous change of rules over time is deeply connected with three powerful features of Dynamic Self-Development Method:
Fast Feedback
Fluid Constraints
Feeling of playing the Game in Real Life
Features of Dynamic Methods
Fast Feedback
In order to move fast in a desired direction one needs to know where to go
In Lean Methods, as I mentioned in other article about existing methods, the decision where to go is based on metrics.
Unfortunately there are many problems with metrics:
They need to be properly selected. If a wrong (vanity) metric is selected then it’s difficult to evaluate if current plan is good or not
Measuring metrics can be time consuming so doing it frequently is a pain
Metrics can fluctuate so making decisions based on a short interval can be misleading because a value of metrics is caused by some random fluctuations rather than a real change
The result is that feedback from metrics is not fast. It’s rather slow. And this is a problem because of two reasons:
Change is demotivating because people don’t see immediate results (due to the lack of feedback). This lack of information requires some “leap of faith” that the solution will work when used for a longer time. But most of the people gave up before that moment
Correction of actions is relatively slow (and this is only under assumption that selected metrics are good) because feedback is slow
In opposition to that Dynamic Methods generates fast feedback. In order to achieve it they can’t use metrics as a main tool to define decisions.
How can this be achieved? By Virtualization of Resources. I don’t want to dwell too much on it here because this topic deserves its own article. However, let me give you an example.
Everybody has some energy to do things. Practically you can’t measure how much of it a person has but what you can do is to create a virtual energy resource. This approach can work because we know what actions add energy (e.g. sleep) and what actions drain energy (e.g. eating junk food). How much do these activities affect this virtual resource? This needs to be defined by a method.
Moving constraints
The Paradox of Life: the more constraints is put on you, the more empowered you are
Dynamic Method is unique in that they are capable to quickly adjust difficulty as a response to the progress of the person. This allows the application of powerful mechanics that can move a “player” of a Dynamic Method into a Flow State where a person gets totally hooked into some activity.
This feature is also deeply connected with a Virtualization of Resources that I already mentioned.
In the article about My Story with Self-Improvement I described the Energy-Dopamine System. This system had a moving constraints feature implemented. Basically for a given activity you can receive up to MAX Energy Points (virtual resource) every day. You will get MAX amount if you do 104% of 14-days average of a given activity. This means that in order to get MAX amount of Energy Points you need to go slightly above 14-days average - and this average grows over time.
Let’s say that you measure time of exercising every day and the last 14-days average was 20 minutes. This means that if you want to get the maximal amount of Energy Points you need to do 104% * 20 min ~ 21 min of exercises.
Feeling of playing the Game in Real Life
This type of method creates a special feeling that is not present in other methods. This feeling is similar to the activity of playing games. This is because:
Flow State is frequently hit as described in the previous section
Player of the method needs to use creativity to decide what to do in order to get a desired amount of some Virtual Resource (it can be desired because of many reasons: to get a reward or to not lose the “game” etc.)
Continuous constraints (difficulty) shift results in the feeling of making progress by the person that uses the Dynamic Method
Since this method is already inherently gamified, adding other “pure” game techniques is relatively easy and additionally triggers the feeling of playing the game
Issues with Dynamic Methods
No existing prototypes
You won’t be able to find many commercial examples where these methods were utilized. There were some attempts made (phrased as gamyfing life) and you can browse them here:
However most of them offer a shallow gamification - that is the one that doesn’t promise a continuous improvement but rather a motivation to do some things in Real Life using some efficient game techniques.
Of course it’s possible to create a Dynamic Method for your own purposes using for example spreadsheets but here there is another problem that I describe in the next section.
Implementation difficulty
This difficulty is twofold:
Rules are complicated so using manual methods (e.g. pen and sheet of paper) just won’t work. And using digital methods requires a lot of setup
Lack of understanding and good examples of the method causes that this area is still in a pioneering stage
Problem with finding a proper difficulty balance
These methods require to set many coefficients and without some trials and errors one cannot know what values they should have in order to make the instance of the Dynamic Method work.
Summary
This newsletter is primarily about Dynamic Methods and about my trials to make an application that will be utilizing this method. In further articles I will be exploring different details about this method and how they can solve many problems people have.