My complicated life has turned into a complicated game, and I prefer it that way. As a busy suburban husband and father with a surfeit of responsibilities, time spent on playing a game like The Sims was difficult to defend, even to myself. Why would I invest any amount of time directing and improving the lives of little pretend people in a little pretend house instead of the real people (including myself) in our real house? The answer is that until recently, the successes in The Sims were attainable, and the real-world ones not so much.

Before I go on, I should make it clear that it’s easy to defend the playing of video games as entertainment. It makes sense that after a long day of mundane tasks that it would be fun to spend half a hour pretending to be a jet fighter pilot, or to be a cosmic prince rolling up the world’s stuff into a giant ball, or any other escapist fantasy. What was weird to me about playing The Sims was that I was choosing to take a break from real chores to entertain myself by performing…pretend chores.

The reason, I believe, is that The Sims is carefully designed to provide you with gradually increasing challenges, a sense of flow, and accomplishment. It shares this property with many other complicated, multi-variable simulation games that would otherwise feel only arduous. Can real life be “played” this same way?

Apparently so. A couple of months ago I bought the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. If you recall, about eight months ago I began using an email scheme based on the principles in this book, without actually having read the book (the scheme was detailed in a MacWorld article). I knew who the source was, and I also knew that my email had been tamed and had stayed tamed. My sister bought his book first and urged me to read it as well. It has definitely been worth it, as my physical inboxes and projects have now also been tamed in the same way.

But an additional benefit that I did not expect was that the mass of annoying and stressful daily chores that drove me to escape in video games was transformed into a kind of game of its own. David Allen really deserves the credit here, as the approach to organization that he describes takes into account the changes that have happened in the types and rates of information that we face, and a thoughtful analysis of how we relate intellectually and emotionally to it. One result is that his system allows for the kind of “flow” that game designers work to create.

This explains, in part, why I haven’t posted anything to this blog for all of February and most of March: I was having fun playing my new “game”, and I hadn’t put “blogging” into that game as a task. I had figured that I would do my usual fun stuff after all the tasks were finished. This is a mistake, though, as there was quite a backlog of real-world tasks, and besides, you’re supposed to put everything that you want to do into the system.

And herein lies the difficulty: there are a lot of things I want to do, and I spent the last two months cramming a lot of those things in, including going onto the South Beach Diet for the first time, which, as I will blog later, is quite an undertaking on its own. One of the important parts of Allen’s system is learning how to say “no” or “someday” to things that you truly don’t have the time for.

In the meantime, I’m having fun playing my great big giant real-life game of The Sims. And just like that game, you don’t win it—you enjoy it.