Make your tasks as easy as playing a video game

by Laurie Hérault

Are you the kind of person who can procrastinate on a task for days but then play a video game for five hours without a break? That paradox frustrated me for years, until I understood that the difference was not discipline.

This article has three parts. First, we look at what makes a game fun to play, and we identify five principles. Then we turn those principles into a simple method that needs nothing but paper. Last, I show a digital solution that makes this method much easier to use.

1Five principles
2How to apply
3Digital solution

Why games keep you moving

At the heart of most video games is a simple mechanism: the InputFeedback loop. You press a key or move a controller, and the game responds immediately with images, sound, or vibration.

Input
Feedback

Of course, moving a pixel on a screen with the arrow keys is not what makes a video game fun. A game can contain many different loops: some are directly connected to the initial input, while others are the result of other loops. Here is a simplified example from a role-playing game:

Input
W/A/S/D
Feedback
Move
Input
Mouse click
Feedback
Attack
Input
Kill enemy
Feedback
Loot drops
Input
Kill enemy
Feedback
XP gained
Input
Gain XP
Feedback
Level up
Input
Level up
Feedback
Skill unlocked

For this article, we can think of each meaningful game loop as a small task.

Principle 1: Atomic tasks

Consider an open-world game such as Far Cry. The overall objective is to free a territory from all the enemies who occupy it. That objective is broken down into very small tasks: reach a location, eliminate a guard, hunt an animal, craft an item, or capture an outpost.

Playing Far Cry is, in the end, checking boxes on a giant to-do list. But those tasks are structured so that they are easy and quick to do, and that is what keeps you playing. Here are the four characteristics of a task in a well-designed video game:

  • Quick: It can be completed in a short amount of time.
  • Well-defined: You know exactly what action to take and what "done" looks like.
  • Easy to start: It feels approachable, not overwhelming, and takes little effort to begin.
  • Ready-to-go: The information, tools, and prerequisites are already in place.

The length or the difficulty of a task obviously depends on the audience. There is a big difference between a casual game and a game made for players who are looking for maximum difficulty. But even with a very high level of difficulty, you are unlikely to find a task that takes more than 15 minutes in a modern video game.

Principle 2: Feedback

Let us come back to the InputFeedback loop. It is worth repeating how important satisfying feedback is. Take a modern shooting game as an example: when you hit an opponent, the visual effects, the sound, or the change in the cursor are all feedback, and they play a huge part in how much fun the game is.

Principle 3: Progress

When you complete a large number of tasks, you feel that you are moving forward in the game.

That feeling can be confirmed, or even amplified, by the game itself, which can display this progression clearly (this is feedback). For example, with a progress bar in a role-playing game, or with a visual progression on a world map like in Far Cry, where you see the territory you have taken back from the enemies.

Principle 4: Time pressure

If you have already completed a game, you can play it again and challenge yourself to finish it as quickly as possible. This idea became the foundation of speedrunning, where players around the world compete to complete games in the shortest time, often improving their records by just a few seconds.

Principle 5: Visibility

This last principle may seem like a small detail, but it is very important. The current task, your progress, and the remaining time should always be visible. This helps players stay focused and keeps their attention on the objective.

What about graphics, story, and fun?

As strange as it may sound, polished graphics, a deep story, or even traditional ideas of fun are not required to make a game hard to put down. You can see this for yourself in incremental games such as Universal Paperclips (free), AdVenture Capitalist (free-to-play), or Cookie Clicker (free in a browser and paid on Steam).

Atomic tasks, feedback, and visible progress can be enough to create a compelling game loop. Time pressure and visibility are optional, but they can make that loop even more engaging.

Feedback
Progress
Atomic task
QuickWell-definedEasy to startReady-to-go
Time pressure
Visibility

How to use these principles

First, keep in mind that an atomic task has no fixed length: if you like the project, steps of 15-20 minutes work fine. If the task is boring, or if you procrastinate on it, break the task down into smaller steps

There is one rule: the more you procrastinate, the smaller the steps should be.

Let us put this into practice with a task: paying bills.

View this interactive demo in the online article:

https://www.colonnes.com/make-your-tasks-as-easy-as-playing-a-video-game

Even though the task list has become longer, the underlying work has not changed. Only its shape has. We have only broken it down into atomic tasks. Each task is quick and well-defined. Each one is easy to start, because no single line is too big on its own.

The order also makes every step ready-to-go: when you reach "Pay the internet bill," you already have the bill in your hand, thanks to the step before, "Find the internet bill for this month." You are less likely to be blocked by a missing prerequisite.

The first atomic task is much easier to start. The following atomic tasks give you frequent feedback and a constant sense of progress. That keeps you going.

Make the feedback physical

Checking a box on a screen is feedback, but you can make it much stronger. Write each atomic task on a sticky note or a small piece of paper. Keep the current note in front of you. This improves visibility and makes the task hard to ignore. When the task is done, crumple the note into a ball: you feel it in your hands, you hear it, and it feels far more real than any checkbox.

Then drop the ball of paper into a clear jar. The growing pile is your progress, real and easy to see.

If the work feels boring, add time pressure with a timer or a Pomodoro session. There is no need to estimate the remaining time precisely: choose a duration that feels slightly challenging. Whether or not you finish before the timer ends does not matter; the goal is to add another layer of motivation. But be careful: if the timer makes you anxious, or if you work in a place where hurrying could be dangerous, skip it.

Protocol

Use this protocol when you are procrastinating on a task, or when you want to make a repetitive task more engaging.

  1. Break the task down into atomic tasks, and write each one on a sticky note or a piece of paper.
  2. Choose a slightly challenging duration and start a time-pressure timer.
  3. Keep only the current task in front of you to maintain visibility.
  4. When you finish a task, crumple its note into a ball and drop it into the jar.
  5. Take the next task and repeat until it is done.

If you still resist starting, the first task is not atomic yet. Break it down again.

How Colonnes applies the method

You do not need software to use this method. Paper is enough. But you may procrastinate on the method itself: writing every atomic task on a sticky note is time-consuming and boring. That is why I looked for a digital way to apply it. I could not find anything satisfactory, so I decided to create my own app: Colonnes ("columns" in French).

Colonnes is not here to replace your calendar or your company's project-management tool. It comes at the end of the process, when you need to turn a project or task into real work. Colonnes follows a three-step workflow:

1Organize
2Plan
3Execute

The Organize and Plan steps are where you create your atomic tasks and decide when to work on them. The Execute step puts the other four principles into practice: feedback, progress, time pressure, and visibility.

View this screenshot in the online article:

https://www.colonnes.com/make-your-tasks-as-easy-as-playing-a-video-game

1. Organize

To make atomic tasks practical, you need an easy way to take an overwhelming task and break it down into smaller atomic tasks. To do this, you need to create levels of tasks and subtasks. The usual way to display them is a tree view. But when you have many tasks, the tree becomes an enormous list.

Creating tasks must also be fast. You should not have to fill in a form with ten fields for every new task.

Colonnes solves the first problem with a system called Miller columns. If you have used a Mac, you already know this layout from the macOS Finder: each level appears in a separate column. Click a folder to show its tasks in the column on the right. You can still see the higher levels for context, but the child tasks of closed folders stay hidden.

Here is a small example of a traditional task tree with three levels:

Here is the same tree shown in columns. This demo is interactive.

View this interactive demo in the online article:

https://www.colonnes.com/make-your-tasks-as-easy-as-playing-a-video-game

Colonnes also has a very simple and fast task system with two work modes. Edit mode lets you create tasks as if you were typing in a regular text editor. When you need to reorganize them, Selection mode lets you work as you would in a file explorer.

View this video in the online article:

https://www.colonnes.com/make-your-tasks-as-easy-as-playing-a-video-game

2. Plan

When you need to plan your tasks, open the Calendar view. It splits the app into two parts, so you can drag your organized tasks into a day's column in the calendar.

But there is no hourly schedule! We all know that a detailed plan with exact start and end times often falls apart when real life gets in the way. Here, each day is a simple task list. Only the order matters.

View this screenshot in the online article:

https://www.colonnes.com/make-your-tasks-as-easy-as-playing-a-video-game

3. Execute

To apply progress, feedback, visibility, and time pressure, Colonnes offers two options: a paper version and a fully digital version.

Colonnes can print your tasks one at a time on a thermal receipt printer1 (the kind you see in your supermarket). This lets you reproduce the sticky-note system with fast, low-cost printing.

Crumpling the receipt makes the feedback stronger. If you put each receipt in a clear jar, you can also see your progress grow.

Colonnes printed task flow demo

View this video in the online article:

https://www.colonnes.com/make-your-tasks-as-easy-as-playing-a-video-game

If you prefer a digital version, Colonnes has a work mode called Stack. Like a game, it shows you one task at a time instead of the whole list. It improves visibility: the current task and progress stay on screen, and you can add time pressure if you want: a fixed length, an end time, a Pomodoro session, or no timer at all.

Stack comes in two forms:

Local Stack is a small window that stays on top of everything else on your desktop.

View this interactive demo in the online article:

https://www.colonnes.com/make-your-tasks-as-easy-as-playing-a-video-game

Remote Stack shows the same Stack on your phone by scanning a QR code, so your phone tells you what to do next instead of being a distraction machine.

View this interactive demo in the online article:

https://www.colonnes.com/make-your-tasks-as-easy-as-playing-a-video-game

More than tasks: flexible, fast, and private

Colonnes holds more than tasks: use text, separator, or heading items to give context. Add colors, your own tags, and conditional formatting rules to highlight what matters most, or templates to organize your repetitive work.

Colonnes is easy to learn for everyone, with drag and drop for every action. But if you want to work as quickly as possible, you can also use it entirely from the keyboard. And there is no need to learn over 100 keyboard shortcuts: a Command Menu covers the actions you do not perform often.

Colonnes is not here to replace your calendar or your company's project-management tool. It is the last step, where a vague task has to become real work. Colonnes is local-first: your documents are stored as files on your computer, keeping the app fast and your data private. Remote Stack is the only feature that requires an internet connection3.

Get started

Colonnes v1 works on macOS and Windows2. You pay once, there is no subscription, and your purchase is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Important notes

1 If you decide to buy a receipt printer, follow the purchasing advice in the Support section to make sure the printer is compatible with your operating system and with Colonnes. Back to text

2 We are currently working on a Linux version. Back to text

3 Remote Stack is the one exception: it requires an internet connection and anonymous data sharing through a cloud server to link two devices. Back to text