Many
years ago, in an effort to increase my writing output, I set myself a goal of writing
a certain number of words each day. It’s
a great idea, but I was rather hit-or-miss on meeting my goal. So one day I decided to give myself a bit of
an incentive. I bought a bag of mixed
little candy bars, and told myself I’d get one whenever I met my goal. If I wrote twice my goal, I’d get two, and so
on. This worked for a couple of …
days. Then one night I was hungry for
something sweet but didn’t have any cookies or anything. I was looking at this almost full bag of
little candy bars, and figured I could eat some now and just owe having to
write those words.
Once
that precedent was set, things kind of snowballed. I quickly finished off that first bag, and a
second, and a third. It wasn’t long
before I had a little container of balled up candy wrappers. Foil ones, not clear ones, and only from
little candies, not full sized candy bars.
That would have been weird. Whenever
I hit my goal, I throw one away.
Whenever I eat a little, foil wrapped candy, I ball up the wrapper and
put it in the container. As things stand
now, I need to write a novel, or three, to pay off my candy debt.
On
one hand, this is silly. It wasn’t long
before I expanded on what counted as paying off the debt, such as submitting a
story or, for the last couple of years I’ve tracked how much time I’ve spent on
writing and writing related activities, and this year I’ve started counting an
hour a week of writing as worth one candy.
Even with that, I’m still a novel or three behind. And yet I stick to it. I’d hate to die with a candy debt. I need to write more, and/or eat less
candy. I just haven’t figured out an
incentive program that would let me, ideally, do both.
***
Image from Pixabay.
No comments:
Post a Comment