This year, I created an online course with the same title, Gameful Project Management, with the following opening in its description, which mirrors well the reason why I created this course and the book it is based upon:
Projects are the building blocks of our professional and personal lives. So, to live joyfully, we need an enthusiastic approach to our projects. In other words, we need to enjoy working on our projects and the processes of their management.
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To celebrate the launch of this course, I have a special offer for you.
You can enroll for the current best price of $9.99 instead of its regular $199.99.
The offer stands only until April 24, 2021, 11:48 PM PDT.
Here is the fourth blog post in a new series featuring videos on YouTube, where I read a paragraph from one of my motivational books and use it as a prompt to speak freely.
This idea was inspired by the free-writing exercise well-known among writers. I used dice and timer to turn this free-speaking exercise into fun games. I hope you enjoy watching them and maybe trying out this gameful approach for yourself and tasks you want or need to tackle today.
The goal of Gameful Project Management is to turn any project, and the management of it, into fun, engaging games, of which you are both the designer and the player. Gameful Project Management assumes that you are open to the possibility of seeing projects and project management tasks (regardless of whether you claim to like them or not) as games. When you see what you do as games and each of its components as a game component, then you quickly realize how to modify those components so that your projects and project management “games” entice the players, in other words, everyone involved in them.
If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.
Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to six of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support and five in the posts solely for subscribers. Gameful Project Management will be one of the next books I will share there.
To discuss the possibility of one-to-one or small team coaching, please contact me through one of the channels listed here.
Here is the eleventh and last (for now) blog post in a series featuring videos on YouTube, where I read from one of my motivational books for one minute. Next week, I will start sharing another series of videos featuring my books.
Question 9: Have you created a checklist for your project?
If not, do it. By now you will have gathered enough information to do so. And remember this checklist is a living document. Keep it close at hand and update it as soon as you think it time to do so. Don’t leave it for later. Follow your first impulse. The short updating of one point takes much less time than trying to get all the points together later. And it is always more accurate.
10. Free Space in Your Checklist
Question 10: Have you left space to add more items or make changes?
If not, find the best format suitable for you and your customer and rewrite the checklist, allowing for the possibility of additions and changes.
And remember that along the way you might discover a new way of doing it. Don’t judge yourself for not having thought of it earlier. Just do it. Even returning to an earlier approach is a step forward, not backward.
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The next step
To take the next step in boosting your entangled projects (and we all have those once in a while), I invite you to read Turn Your No Into Yes. To look at the book and buy it on Amazon, click on its title above or this image below:
If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.
Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to four of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support and three in the posts solely for subscribers. Turn Your No Into Yes will appear later this year or sooner upon explicit request from the subscribers.
I wish you a beautiful, productive, fun, creative, and gameful day!
When I first embarked on my adventure with Gameful Project Management, I couldn’t find many resources on approaching project management gamefully. I was searching for the following combination of words: “gameful project management.”
A bit later, still unable to believe that there could be nothing written on it, given how many gamified software solutions for project management there are, I searched for “project management gamification” instead. And sure enough, there were many articles, at least one master thesis, and various books addressing the topic of project management and gamification one way or another.
I started reading eagerly, determined to learn from, and quote as many of the sources as possible.
But the more I read, the more I felt I was moving in the “wrong” direction. A quote by the award-winning authors Ariel and Shya Kane, whom I have quoted previously, came to mind. They once said, “We have come to realize if we are not having fun, we are moving in the wrong direction.”
If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.
Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to four of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support and three in the posts solely for subscribers. Gameful Project Management will be one of the next books I will share there.
To discuss the possibility of one-to-one or small team coaching, contact me through one of the channels listed here.
(Image courtesy of the author; taken in January 2020 by the author’s then 5-year old daughter)
Successful leadership embraces management skills. But any successful manager is a successful self-manager.
And these successful managers and self-managers know that the best leadership and management is not about control and never about manipulation. It is focused on support. This also applies to self-management.
There are many aspects to management both when we manage teams, projects, or ourselves. We can use many different tools and techniques.
But any of those tools or techniques would not bear any fruit if you don’t concentrate on support for your team, project, and yourself.
The best way to support anyone— and you will know it from when you supported your children or younger siblings and friends when they were upset or needed to accomplish something and resisted it — is to turn the activity at hand into a fun game or play.
That includes management of any kind.
Here is an utterly simple tool to ignite the “idea-generating machine” in your head to approach management tasks — be it for the team, project, the whole company, or yourself — gamefully. Ask yourself the following question:
“If this [challenge, project, task, activity, chore] was a game, how would I approach it as its designer or player?”
Awareness and permitting yourself to be gameful and playful is all it takes to shift your focus from stressed and overwhelmed to supportive and creative.
