AI Productivity Hack: Gamification

Full video transcript

Hello everybody, Kelly Tenny here, co-host of the Scale with AI Summit, and welcome to this mini hack session. I’m super excited to be here with the amazing Brittney Long, who is no stranger to AI. We’ve interviewed her a ton of times on the Women Who AI Summit, and I was just sharing before we started recording with Brittney that when I think about hacks, when I think about people who have these amazing cool hacks that help us scale, help us be more productive, help make growing our businesses more fun, help us be more efficient, Brittney is always top of mind. Brittney, you’re always doing something really cool and really new with AI, and so I want to welcome you today and thank you for being here on this hack session with us.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Yeah, and if you don’t know Brittney yet, Brittney is the founder of Impact Driven AI. She’s a former educator, which is probably why we always have such good conversations, but she really dives into teaching entrepreneurs simple AI tools to fast-track their business. So I think you’re a perfect fit for our hackathon and our Scale with AI Summit, and with that I’d love for you to share a little bit of what you’re going to be showing us.

Yeah, so today we’re going to be talking about gamifying your life, gamifying your business. It’s something I’ve been doing. For me personally, I know I’m going to get stuff done if it’s fun. When I think about doing laundry and putting it away, that is not fun for me. I’ve always come up with little games to play so that I’ll actually get stuff done, and I thought, you know what, I bet AI can help me with this, and I can get things done a lot faster if I’m not having the resistance to it because it feels fun. That’s where this all started.

I love that, because I know you talked about doing laundry, but I feel like this might resonate with a lot of people watching. Even inside your business, no matter how passionate you are about your business or how much you love your clients, there are always these routine tasks that I put off because I’m just not motivated to do them, because they’re not as fun as doing live interviews like this one, or having calls with clients. Maybe it’s things like cleaning out your email inbox or writing a blog post. While those things are important, motivation, or lack thereof, is one of the biggest things I hear when I ask business owners why they don’t do that consistently. So I’m excited to see what you have to show us, because I think sometimes we just need that extra motivation. I know there are a lot of entrepreneurs like you and me who love gamification, whether it’s the badge, the points, some kind of competition, or some kind of scoring. I’m a runner, and I use my Garmin because it compares my run to my last run, and a badge goes off if I ran a fast mile. This whole world is gamification, and I love that you’ve been able to harness AI to do that. So with that being said, I would love for you to do a little demonstration of the system you’ve created and how you’ve been able to gamify some of your tasks.

Perfect. We’ll start with ChatGPT. It doesn’t have to be complicated. We don’t have to put it into a huge automation or anything like that; you can if you want, but I’ll show you how to do it simply. Let’s go ahead, I’ll share my screen and we’ll go with it. The first thing I want to do when I come in is figure out what my tasks are and what success looks like for me. So typically I’m going to start here and say, “I’m going to tell you about what success looks like for me and what I want your help with.” I’ll put that in, and you probably know by now, but just in case you don’t, it’s okay to spell things wrong in here; it’s still going to know what you’re talking about, thank goodness, so we don’t have to stop.

So I’m going to say success for this week is finishing a sales page, writing abandoned cart emails, writing launch emails, planning mastermind topics. Now it’s a lot of copy and a lot of writing, and I actually really like copy and writing, but when there’s this much of it, I find myself feeling a lot of resistance, and something that might take me an hour will take me like ten days because I’m pushing against it so much. So planning a mastermind topic, our call topics, I’ll also say finishing laundry, running a mile, and going to the gym, so those are the things I’m really resisting and don’t really want to be on.

So this is what success looks like for me for this week, and then I’m going to press enter in just a second. I’m going to say, “Help me find ways to gamify this and make it fun so I get it done.” Now sometimes I’ll also include information about my personality, so I’ll say things like “I’m an Enneagram 7 wing 8, or INFJ on the Myers-Briggs personality test.” The more info I can give it like that, the easier it is to find gamification that works for me. So I might also say something like “I’m a former athlete, so I love competition. Enneagram 7 wing 8, so typically that means I want things to be really fun, INFJ,” and then we’re going to press enter on that. It’s going to give us some ideas.

So this first stage, where you’re asking for ideas, you’re looking for ideation. It’s going to come up with a few ideas, and you’re going to say what you like and don’t like. Now the first time you do this it might take a little bit of time, maybe ten minutes, but when you do it again in the future I would just use the same exact chat for it, so that you don’t have to keep training it on the kind of stuff you like and don’t like. It already knows that, and you can just tell it, “Here’s the stuff I need to get done this week.”

So the first thing it gave me was “Level One Boss Battle,” and the reason it did that was because I’ve trained it before, I’ve talked to it about this before, so that’s why it came up with boss battle right away. So my boss battle: if I complete it in under 20 minutes, I unlock a reward. Rewards are very big for me, I really like that. It also helps me earn “Sales Page Champion” status for the week. That means absolutely nothing, like nothing is actually going to happen, but if I get sales page champion, I know it in my heart and I’m excited about it. So I could even ask it to create a badge for me if I wanted to, and then here we have some ideas on that as well. But let’s say I’m looking at my warrior quests and I’m like, “Warrior Quest sounds boring, try something else.” You’ll notice it’s also telling me things like “within 30 minutes, within 5 minutes,” because that’s something I know works for me. In some of my previous chats I’ve talked to it about needing a time limit, and if I do it in a time limit then I get something from it, so that’s why you’re seeing that, because I put in the work on previous prompts and that’s coming back.

Here, my laundry one, I get “Household Hero” status for the day. Nobody else is going to know, I guess I could tell my husband I’m the household hero today, but anyway that’s mostly for me. Now here, looking at the gym, “Plan three small fitness challenges,” that’s something else I told it really works for me. Something else I can do is say, “I want some more ideas, and I want you to think outside the box.” Now sometimes when I say think outside the box, it doesn’t really do that, so I usually say “I want you to think outside the box so far outside the box there is no box,” and that really seems to open up the ideas for it.

Now while that’s happening, I’m going to show you one more thing. I’m going to stop my share for just a second so I can pull something else up, but in addition to using ChatGPT to help me, I know that crossing things off also really works for me. In addition to having it just in ChatGPT, I actually had it create, here’s all the things you need to do to get from where you are to hitting a million in your business, here’s all the tasks to do. Some of these tasks, I was looking at them and thought, “I don’t feel excited about that at all,” so I thought maybe if I make this into a game board, that would become a lot of fun for me. So I took the tasks I knew I had to do and I also gave it some parameters, like how much I’m making per month right now, how much time I have, what I want to be making by the end of 2025 per month, and asked it to tell me exactly what tasks I need to do to get from here to there, and give me the subtasks too. So we went really in depth, not just “write a sales page,” but everything it takes to actually write the sales page, like the market research and stuff like that.

Then from there I had it list the most important tasks, and I had it create an image background. For that I said, “Create a background image for a game board without any spaces, that has a Lord of the Rings vibe.” So then it’s going to create an image, and I’ll tell it if I want to change anything, but it was really pretty quick to create the image background for it, and then I just added the boxes where I could put this in. And the next thing I did, because I take competition and gamification very seriously, is I sent this to Staples and got it printed and laminated, so now I can actually mark it off as I go. You’ll see a few free spaces here in case I needed to add anything in, but it has the kinds of tasks; I told it my biggest obstacle is traffic, so I told it to create those tasks for me, it did, I filled them in, and now we have my game board that I can cross off every day. As I’m saying this out loud I’m realizing I really went for it on this, but I have this that I could use, or I could use something else, but it gives me the idea. If I want to edit this I can click here and select that and say remove or add something else, and usually it does a pretty good job. Sometimes it’ll be a little funky; it was trying to say “Lord of the Rings” up there, and it created a bunch of little rings down here.

I have to share, for a minute while I’m listening to you, as I’m saying this out loud, I’m like “okay, maybe I really went for it,” but for me, and I think there are so many people probably watching, and Britney, for your business as well, I’m like, what a cool hack. For me with online course creation, which people put off all the time, there’s hardly anybody that finishes their online course within the parameters of when they’re supposed to. I’m like, how cool could it be for a business owner or a coach to be able to have gamification for their clients who need a little bit more motivation, and how powerful and fun would this be for people who do group programs, to say “we’re going to do a seven-day sprint, and you’ve got to get through the game board and have prizes.” I love that you’re using it for yourself, but I think this isn’t only a great personal motivator, I’m a crosser, so if I had this game board thing I certainly would not miss a day, but to use it with other people, to keep motivation, to use with your kids, to use with your clients, what a cool concept, I love it.

Going to what you said about using it with your kids, we’ve done that with chores, where I’ll say here’s how many people we have in our house, here are the ages, here are the kinds of chores each person likes doing, here are the chores each person hates doing or that take a long time to do, and then I asked it to come up with gamification ideas for that too. So one of the ones that came up for washing the dishes, which is not something I particularly enjoy, was for every five minutes of washing dishes, I did a one-minute dance break, and I don’t know what it is about that but it works for me. It helped me think outside of “I have to do this task and it has to be hard or unpleasant.” Then, using it for your clients or customers, you can even have them fill out a form as part of their onboarding and ask what’s the best way to give you feedback, what motivates you, where have you had a lot of success before and why do you think that is, and then by getting that you can even trigger it, like with Zapier, so it creates a plan for them, like a motivation plan or a gamification plan that’s custom to them. So the board game works for me, but for some people that might feel stressful, and by doing that you get to actually customize every kind of gamification based on what they said works for them, which is just so cool that we have the ability to do that.

I love it. So let’s take a look at some of the new ones it came up with for me. It gave me the “Time Traveler’s Spellbook”: imagine your sales page is a legendary spell book, each section completed is a new spell unlocked, with powers that only get stronger as the spell book grows. This one’s kind of interesting, it definitely thought outside the box, so I like that. I also like that it’s talking about it like “next adventures,” because that’s fun, so I could be left on the side of the road, but if it feels like an adventure I’m like, “oh, this is amazing,” versus “oh, this is awful, my car broke down.” Also “top secret mission” works for me; those are some of the ones, you see a lot of mission, vision, quest, challenge, those things I know work really well for me. But I might say, “I want accountability with it, hosting something is fine, I like dancing, I like snacks, give me more ideas, and also tell me other tasks you can help with too.”

So we’ve talked a little bit about what it looks like to maybe connect with Zapier or Make or something like that, but for a lot of this it doesn’t have to require a lot of different tools. You can even just go with ChatGPT to get started, get those ideas, and decide what’s the best way to move forward from there. Maybe that’s having a chat you check in with once a day, with ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, where you say, “here’s what I said I’m going to do,” and then when you do it you say, “here’s what I did,” and it says, “awesome, you got the household hero award,” or whatever the award was. Here’s another one: every time you finish a major task, celebrate with a short dance and record a clip, each task completion becomes a mini dance break where you get to show off a bit. This might be good if I’m thinking ahead about big changes in my life and health for this year, and thinking at the end of the year I want to be able to post a video that shows all the wins I’ve had. I like that because it’s double duty, it’s doing something for my business and giving me a dance break. For each small task completed I unlock a snack power-up, progress posting always works for me too. This is an interesting one, “spin the task wheel,” because it gives you some of that randomness, which a lot of people who like personality tests know Enneagram 7 wing 8s tend to like. And then it gives other ideas too; we talked about the daily check-ins, but those are just a few of the ways it can help, and a few ways you can gamify. I think the biggest obstacle to what you can do with it as far as gamification is really just your imagination, and if you’re not sure, you can even just ask, like we did earlier, “what are other ways you can help me gamify.”

I love that, and I love your suggestion of going back at the end of the day. I feel like a lot of us work from home, obviously we’re on our own, so this is a great way to ask “what are some ways I can gamify, what are some ways I can stay motivated.” I’ve been in situations, and you probably have too, where you’ve got an accountability partner, and I see that all the time, “need an accountability partner.” What often happens with an accountability partner is the intention is that you hold one another accountable, but personally sometimes I feel silly for saying “I did it, I did my email sequence,” because sometimes I feel like they’re going to think “you should have.” But I like that you said you could go back at the end of the day and literally say “I finished the thing,” and have it be like “amazing, you’re a sales master now,” and just get that feedback and motivation. We all know AI enough to know it’s going to do more than say congratulations, it’s going to say something like “getting your email sequence done is going to add value to your clients,” so it’s going to give more of that feedback, and I never thought to use it as a check-in cheerleader.

Yeah, I like it too, because when I’m doing accountability with another person, sometimes I’ll feel bad if I’m on a streak and things are going well and they’re in a low period or super busy, I feel bad checking in with them every day being like “I did something awesome again,” especially if they’re like “I can’t seem to get things going, I feel like crap.” I really feel bad saying “I did this,” so I like being able to go to ChatGPT and say “I did this thing,” and for it to, even though it’s a machine and not actually emotionally happy for me, I still feel something there. I’ve done that with one of these chats, where I’ll basically say, “here’s the stuff I need to get done,” and then I’ll check in with it once I’ve gotten it done, and I’ll ask it to let me know if this is helping me, if this is getting me closer to where I want to go, and it’ll say “yes, based on what you said you’re on the right track,” or “based on what you said you might want to do X, Y, and Z more.” And hearing “you might want to do X, Y, and Z more,” I’m like, “oh okay, I’ll do that,” because sometimes I’ll do the work, but it’s not always the right work, and when it tells me “you’re on the right track,” I’m like “I am on the right track, I can do this,” and it gives that extra little motivation you need to keep pushing through.

Yeah, I love it, that is a hack for sure, and again, your hack is so applicable to what other people are looking for, to keep their clients motivated, their kids motivated. I’m about to go make a board game to see if my kids can stay up with their chores. That’s what it’s all about, and that’s what you’re so great with. I know we’ve had many conversations about AI, and you’re so great with thinking outside the box in terms of AI in our business and AI in our life. You’ve done some really great things around AI in your life as well, so that we can really wear all the hats we’re trying to wear as business owners and parents and spouses and things like that. So thank you so much, Brittney, for being on here with us in this hack session. I know many people are probably going to go use ChatGPT for a little bit of extra motivation, and I think I’m going to challenge you: I think you should do some kind of business owners gamified sprint or something like that, I think it would be really fun, lots of cool things from the game board to just coming up with ideas of how you can reward yourself.

Thank you, thanks for having me, and thanks everybody for joining Brittney and I on this Scale with AI Summit hack session. We’ll see you on the outside in future upcoming sessions. Take care, everybody.