The Coin Game is one of the tools I’ve come up with to help myself recognize when I do accomplish something of value. It also helps motivate me to do more.

Boring tasks are hard, especially for ADHD brains. On top of this, when we do actually manage to accomplish something, we don’t give ourselves credit for it. Sometimes it feels like it shouldn’t count because of how long it takes. Sometimes getting it done involved lots of irrelevant tangents, and we “yeah but” all the value away. At the same time, most of us do actually contribute enough value to our employers that they keep us on staff.

The short short version is that you earn a coin every time you deliver a unit of value. Originally the idea was you’d use these coins to “buy” yourself some guilt free break time. After working with this for five months what I’ve come to learn is that the real value of this “game” is the physical evidence that you’ve accomplished something. On days when motivation is lacking, or it feels like you’re just being useless, each coin is proof that you’ve accomplished something of value.

The coins you earn are based on things that you consider valuable about what you do. Working towards these intrinsic (not extrinsic) goals makes all the difference. Every time I earn a coin, I do a happy dance, and get a real sense of accomplishment. “I earned a coin!” Every time I feel like I’m not making any progress I look down and see “Hey, I’ve already delivered x coin(s) worth of value today.”

How it works

Prerequisites:

• an idea of what your valuable contributions are
• a small stack of coins
• 2 Post-It™️ note sized pieces of paper.

The key to this is coming up with a list of things you do for your job that constitute “delivering value”. How long it takes you to do the thing is irrelevant. What matters is if it’s actually providing notable value to you and/or your coworkers. This is important because we can’t reward ourselves for doing something valuable if we don’t know what value we provide. This is also going to help us set realistic expectations for ourselves.

In addition to the actions you’ve been hired to perform, think about the actions you take that improve life/work for your coworkers or company in notable ways. These have value too. You may not have been hired to improve that process, or code up some useful utility, but if it makes the lives of you or your coworkers better, you’ve delivered value.

Here are some of my “valuable” things (I’m a programmer):

• creating a “Pull Request” for some new functionality or bug fix (a code deliverable)
• carefully reviewing and testing a coworker’s Pull Request
• implementing non-trivial changes requested by a coworker’s review.
• representing our team in some politically important meeting
• spending 15 minutes researching, and making a decision that will save us hours / days of frustration going forward.

Once you’ve got an initial list, you’ll need some “coins”. You can use “normal” coins like quarters, but I think it’s better if you can use something “novel”. I 3D printed some “Pirates of the Caribbean” coins. You could grab some tokens from a board game, use foreign currency, or whatever. Most days I deliver 1-3 units of value. I have actually had a 5 coin day and it was kinda mind-blowing.

Next, you’ll need 2 Post-It™️ note size pieces of paper. The first one is “The Bank”. The other one is “Booty!”

Take both of these pieces of paper and place them on your desk. They should be in your normal line of sight, but where they’re not in the way.

At the start of each day you take all your booty and move it back to the Bank. Every time you deliver something of value, you earn a coin and move it from The Bank, to your Booty!.

Each coin is a physical representation your accomplishments. It’s proof that you delivered value. You’ve done your job. Feel free to go go off and replenish your dopamine levels. Doing it without thinking about how you “should be working” is going to help you come back more refreshed, and more capable of earning more coins… er… delivering more value. ;)

Some followup thoughts:

Most days I earn 1-3 coins. That’s 1-3 things units of real value to the company. One coin sounds like very little, but sometimes it just takes a day to get a thing done, and that’s ok. In the past I’ve worked on tasks where I haven’t “delivered” anything for a month, but along the way I finished off a number of sub-tasks. If that happens again, I’ll reward myself for the accomplishments along the way. It’s important to recognize that we are accomplishing things even if they’re not ready to hand off to others.