Gamification

I’ve had a very relaxing weekend with a lot of rest, limited drinks, and not that many activities. It’s been awesome to rejuvenate especially since I’m headed to a bachelor party in New Orleans from Thursday - Monday.

I took an interactive spin class this morning at Equinox that measures each biker’s ride and uses that data to put everyone in mini-games.

Throughout the 50 minute class, you will warm-up, do a traditional one song ride, mini-game, one song ride, next mini-game, and so on for a total of 3 games.

I am not a big cycling fan as I feel like I get much better workouts in other exercises like running, but this is the one cycling class that I truly love.

The mini-games are fantastic as it encourages competition among your classmates while doing a great job of not embarrassing the slow riders. The games today were an individual game, followed by a 2 team competition, and then a 4 team competition.

I have always been a competitive person and nothing gets me going more than trying to win. Reflecting after class, I realized that I’ve never cycled this hard in my entire life.

This is a successful use case of “gamification” and I love the idea of “gamifying” everyday tasks.

Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra describes how his team designs products with the same video game principles that create joyful experiences.

I’m planning on writing about my recent foray into using Superhuman this week, but reaching inbox zero daily feels like a game. One that I need to win every single day.

Everyone is motivated differently, but for me, nothing works better than competition through games. I’m very excited to continue to see the trend of companies and software moving towards “gamifying” everyday tasks that lead to efficiency.

In the case of cycling classes, I’m going to need to practice a lot more as I came in 7th out of 8th of the men in the class and on the bottom quartile including women. The winner by far in this class including both men and women was Anne. After class, I glanced over to bike 39 to get a glimpse of this superwoman expecting to see a jacked lady who could probably break me in half.

To my surprise, Anne was a middle-aged fairly built woman who looked closer to a grandmother than someone who just biked 20 miles faster and harder than the entire class. Needless to say, I was very impressed, but it makes me want to work harder and beat Anne one day.