Doing things the fun way
I loved playing with toys as a kid, however when I was done I hated having to put them away. It was so boring, yet my parents seemed to be quite emphatic about it's importance, stepping on legos and all. So I came up with a compromise! What if I could play with my toys while I put them away?!? My main method would be to would put a toy on a racecar then race it around the room ultimately placing it in the toy bin. I theorized that I could repeat this process till all the toys were put away and would enjoy myself much more.
My parents were not too impressed though. My productivity when it came to putting away toys may have been more fun, but it turns out putting a single toy away one-by-one slowly rather than grabbing handfuls as fast as I could was a lot slower. Despite this I had a really hard time seeing this productivity gap.
Not only that, but when you're having fun it's hard not to get distracted by the coolness of the toy I was putting away. Hence the mystery was solved of why my parents would come back just in time to see me put a toy in the bucket (despite the rest of the room looked exactly the same).
While this may seem to be only a childish feeling, kids are easily distracted and use fun as their fuel but I believe Adults aren't all that different. We all like to do things the fun way rather than the productive way, especially when we don't realize it's any slower. And we probably won't because time passes more quickly when we're having fun.
Keywords: Dopamine, Dark Pattern, Slack's Design, Productivity
#anecdotes
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