Comment by reverendsteveii
2 days ago
my receipt printer is a whiteboard in the gym. I went from "I do some scattered, random assortment of lifts when I feel like it" to "I have 3 routines I cycle through every day" and what it took was writing down each routine and tracking the weight I did last time. Checking off my daily workout is my pulling a ticket down off the chore kanban. Every once in a while, as I get stronger, I get to "take a number off the board" meaning I've surpassed that amount of weight in my routine (eg: after a few weeks of doing 25 pound lateral shoulder raises I'm able to bump my routine up to 30. if no other exercises use 25 pound dumbbells I can erase the 25 off the board). That's my "dumping out the jar". It's worked for 2 years, I've gone from being at best a dilettante in this space to losing 50 pounds, gaining the ability to bench press my weight and, and this is the important part, I feel good about my body for the first time in my forty years. I think the difference is that it's several gameplay loops at once. The short loop is "do today's workout, get today's dopamine pop", the medium term loop is "let me see if I can work out more days this month than last month" and the long term loop is "let me see if I can get strong enough that 30 pounds is trivial for me". With those multiple, simultaneous loops there's a variety in the (ephemeral, immaterial, entirely made up and internal) reward that stops it from becoming meaningless. I think OP's system has a parallel structure: the two reward loops are completing a ticket and emptying the jar.
> and what it took was writing down each routine and tracking the weight I did last time.
I think there's a huge connection to physically writing it as opposed to typing and printing. I never did anything with the weight lifting logs, I thought I might, but the most I ever did with anything in the past was looking at the progression from the last few days or weeks.
I really do think that there's something reifying about the physical act of writing it down. I think that because in one of my many stutterstepping starts into the world of weightlifting I tried keeping a log on my phone and it did all the same things that keeping a log on the wall does (arguably more, the whiteboard doesn't track historical data and can't automatically generate charts for me) but it just felt like shouting numbers into the void every day. There was no sense of job-well-done satisfaction when I hit a personal best, there was no little ceremony of removing a number from the board to make room for a new, higher number. There was just a bunch of individual workouts and I either did them or I didn't and no one cared either way, including me.
Yes, that is exactly it. The tools may be different, but the essence of the method is exactly the same.