Making the most out of Lifelog: Gamification

I realised I don’t do a good enough job of sharing some of the ways to make the most out of Lifelog’s features, especially to newcomers. So here’s one about Lifelog’s gamification features, and how you can gamify your daily writing here:

Streaks

The most obvious gamified feature on Lifelog – the streak. It’s an unbroken chain of consecutive days or times you performed a task, which mostly means writing here. It’s like competition with yourself. You try to not break the chain by being consistent. There’s a few types of streaks on Lifelog:

• Current streak: The primary streak for daily writing. Miss a day, and it sets back to zero. This is the most hardcore one of the lot.
• Streaks: The number of streaks you made. We want to celebrate people bouncing back from having broken their streaks, so this goes out to them master streak-breakers.
• Best streak: This is the longest streak (amongst your “Streaks”) you ever hit.
• Posts: The number of posts you wrote.
• Goals set: The number of goals set.
• Comments: The system also tracks the number of comments made.

Leaderboards

This is there part where you can ‘compete’ with others based on the streaks. I say ‘compete’ because it’s just a game to help push us further. The /community page and home page right side bar shows the leaders for each of the streak categories. It’s great to see how everyone wins in their own ways.

Profile badges

Do you know you unlock achievements when you cross certain writing milestones on Lifelog? Once unlocked, the badges will show up on your Profile page. Here’s all the badges you can collect, and how to unlock them:

Best streak*

• 🥚 First post - when you write your first post
• 🎰 7 in a row - when you write for 7 days consecutively
• 🔥 TeamStreak - 30 days unbroken daily writing
• 💎 1 year club - 365 days of daily writing

* if you get them one time, you keep them, even if your Current Streak is broken

Streaks

• 🐇 Rebouncer - when you bounced back from your streak for 10 times
• 🐢 Resilient - 50 times streak bounces
• 💪 Unbreakable - 100 times streak bounces

Posts/comments

• ✍️ 30 posts - you wrote 30 posts in total, streak broken or not
• 💬 Ringleader - 100 comments commented

Public accountability

Yes, all the posts are public. Each comes with a unique URL. There’s no plans to have private mode for posts, because that defeats the purpose of public accountability and lowers the sense of community. Everyone can witness your effort in public. My hope is that this public eye helps motivate us to keep writing.

Social influence

Writing alongside others is a core aspect of Lifelog. When we see everyone writing daily, we get pulled along with the group to keep the daily writing habit going. When we see someone killing it on his or her goals, we feel inspired to achieve our own goals too. When someone leaves a comment, a note of encouragement, a new idea, offer advice or a suggestion, we all benefit. Lifelog is still a small, tight-knit community, so there’s a cosy feel to the engagement you can’t get elsewhere on social media.

Which gamification features are your favourites? Anything good gamification ideas to add?