This is a follow-up post to Gamification showing how I use it and what purpose does it serve me.

In summary, I'm a kind of control freak who likes all sorts of stats (such as my systems stats or a projects repo stats) displayed neatly all over the place, and it was only a matter of time before I started monitoring myself, and so I wrote a tiny tool, Gamify, that integrates with Emacs' Org-Mode and tracks my skills, their dependencies and their development.

Gamification

Gamification (ˌɡeɪmɪfɪˈkeɪʃ(ə)n) is the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service: gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun.

Let's see how to apply it to optimize performing daily activities and get some useful statistics out of it...

Resistance is futile...

First of all, I barely look at my desktop. There's just no reason to do that other than checking some of the system stats such as memory usage or CPU load when I'm hacking arround and testing stuff.

For this particular use-case I figured the Emacs mode-line would be perfect to display all the relevant statistics directly in Emacs in such a way that I could glance through them without interrupting my workflow - giving me real-time feedback with minimal distraction.