motivation and organization in my depressed era: the questbook
I use a commonplace book. If you don't know what that is, it's a notebook that you put everything into so it's all in one place. You get to individually decide what "everything" is, but for me, this is all notes, quotes, ideas, sketches, poems, and plans. There are a lot of reasons a person might use one, but I do it for organization and inspiration purposes. Thus, I don't use it to write long story sections because they take up too much room. I have a separate notebook for that.
I started using a commonplace book because the system I used before was draining my inspiration and my motivation. Everything was scattered and it felt like a chore to find where I wrote down any one idea. This exact feeling is why I made my questbook.
What is a questbook? Well, it's a book of quests, specifically your quests. Everything you need or want to do in one notebook, laid out like quests from an adventurer's guild.
Why would someone do this? Isn't that just a glorified to-do list? Well, yes. But it's a reframing tool, and if therapy has taught me anything, it's the reframing that's important. I have depression and terrible executive dysfunction and a severe lack of will and motivation on a good day. A list of chores does not inspire me to actually do anything. And that's bad because the entire point is that I have to do them. But quests are adventures and adventures are fun. I'm not "walking to the store for milk because my brother can't be trusted to cross the street safely", I'm "venturing forth into the wilderness to acquire cow's milk, a quest too dangerous for my younger brother to complete". This might sound stupid to you, but it works for me. It might work for other people too.
And the reframing aspect isn't the only reason it works. It's a list of everything I need or want to do. It's all mixed up in there. I have things I want to accomplish in my new favorite block game Vintage Story next to tedious tweaks I need to make to my site next to all the things I need to buy on my next treacherous trip out of doors. And this aspect was heavily inspired by my commonplace book.
Often, all my tasks were scattered. I had a planner and calendar for irl things, I had a to-do list for chores, I had books or signs in my games detailing what I needed for my next project, every hobby-oriented mission lay somewhere in the back of my mind, and all my grand goals for life were written somewhere in the hazy entries of my journal. And the truth is: almost none of it ever actually got done. Not even the fun stuff. Somehow, all these separate and usually organized lists of tasks were so completely draining that I was never inspired to keep up with them. They would lie abandoned for months or become immediately forgotten once made.
This was a problem. It felt like I was never going anywhere or ever doing anything.
And then I had the idea to make One Big List, inspired by the success of my commonplace book, which had already reached its second edition with no signs of being abandoned. So I took my phone, I installed a to-do list app, and I wrote down everything I wanted to do. Everything. Every chore, every goal, every mission, every fun thing, every boring thing, everything.
I organized all of them into two categories: urgent and non-urgent. I did this based on what I wanted to get done first, either because it was necessary to get done or because I just really wanted to do it.
At first, I started off mostly completing the fun quests. You know, the hobby stuff, my game tasks, etc. But then, slowly, that morphed into an ability to do the not-fun ones too. I mean, think about it. Doing quests was often fun, so I wanted to do more. It's not that hard to understand.
At this point, I wasn't thinking of this List as a questbook yet. That came when I decided I wanted to move it to paper. This decision was for a variety of reasons. I wanted to use my phone less. I have a glut of stationary and I really do need to use it. I knew that having something tangible to hold for my monkey brain was better for me overall.
So I picked a notebook and I wrote everything on the List inside of it. I still organized it by urgent and non-urgent. I did this by putting urgent things on the right pages in the notebook (since I can write more easily on that side if I need to add something quickly) and non-urgent things on the left. I had the thought that this made the notebook seem a lot like a questboard. You know where they separate the high priority quests and stamp them with a red seal? I took the thought and ran with it.
I pulled out my highlighters. I made pink for things that were necessary, made blue for things that were important (specifically to me), and made green for things that were somewhat optional. Sorting the quests into these categories was simpler than I thought it would be. I asked myself two questions. First, "is this thing necessary for me to do?". If the answer was yes, it got pink. If no, then I moved on to "is doing this thing important to me?". If yes, then it got blue. If the answer was anything similar to "not really", it got green.
Most things in my questbook are blue. Many are green. Very few are pink. This makes me really excited to do pink quests because it really feels like I've done something when I cross them off. Even when the quest is something as simple as "go buy milk".
Making it a physical notebook was a stroke of genius as well. It gives it such a feeling of progress. My advice to anyone who wants to master a skill is always "fill something with it", and I feel like an idiot that it only just now occurred to me to do it with everyday tasks. When I had it on my phone, I didn't delete completed tasks because I felt it would defeat the purpose of making me feel like I made progress. But I didn't realize how much the scrollbar was diminishing the scale of it. I can (and have) easily fill a page a day with quests and the desire to complete quests just so I can say I've crossed out an entire page is intense. I find myself doing things just because they're on a page where a bunch of stuff is already crossed out or because they're several pages back from where I am currently. Which is an insane feeling. Things I hate doing, only done promptly because they're written on the same page as the crossed out "tame chickens in Vintage Story". Craziness.
Recently, I've toyed with ideas for really leaning into the questbook framing of it. Do I give myself quest rewards for completing them? Do I make some look like wanted posters with little doodles? Having a bounty out on a gallon of milk seems like a funny concept.
My point here is that you can do something fun with it, if you try it yourself. To be entirely honest, I'll probably keep it as is, even though my method is a little utilitarian and boring for the name I've given it. Giving myself rewards for doing them is a slippery slope likely to backfire. And I'm actually very good at reframing already, so really I only need the words and the book to put me in the right mindset. No milk bounties required. But someone else might be different.
(Fun fact: the writing of this post was a quest lol)