Sitting in a deck chair, eating an overpriced takeout as we listened to the fireworks, I vowed, ‘Never again’.

Moving into an apartment on New Year’s Eve in 2011 had been madness – especially a new build. None of the appliances had been hooked up and our promised furniture was nowhere to be seen.

It was the fifth time my husband Christian and I had moved in six years – and it had always been a chaotic, stressful mess.

On one occasion, we only found somewhere new to live on the final day of our tenancy. Another time, we left it too late to book a removal van during a busy festive season – leaving us to move an entire apartment by hand to a new one down the street in the middle of a snow storm.

This year, when we had to move again, however, we finally cracked the code.

We realised what had been missing from the process was gamification – a way of making things fun!

Gamification is a way of tackling tasks by making them more like the experience of playing games, like hopscotch or chess.

I’d heard about the concept from an expert in my business community, Kimba Cooper-Martin, who had been talking about it on social media for months.

The essence of gamification is understanding what it is that makes those games so compelling, what motivates people to take part – and then keep playing.

Then, it’s applying those concepts into non-game settings.

Initially, we completed a six-week gamification course with Kimba in March, learning about the four main ‘player types’ – ‘Achiever’, ‘Killer’, ‘Explorer’ and ‘Socialiser’ – as defined by Professor Richard Bartle.

Within weeks, we realised that, having identified as ‘Achievers’, we could apply this new behavioural knowledge when we next moved house.

Firstly, in an attempt to make the move easier, we decided to declutter. Not always the easiest of tasks.

So, to make it feel more playful, we listed everything we owned, then added three separate columns: ‘Keep’, ‘Dispose’, ‘Unsure’.

Rather than debating every item together, we filled the list in separately, then asked each other to guess our answers. It was far more fun to see just how many we got right – and wrong – rather than ending bickering over every single cup or plate.  

Thankfully, we discovered we were on the same page with 90% of our belongings – leaving us with just a few items to compromise on.

Buoyed by this early success, we made another key decision. Instead of moving out of one rental and into the other on the same day, as we’d always done before, we kept our old house on for the first three weeks of our new tenancy.

The rules of our moving game had been set, and we had officially activated our virtual countdown timer!

We then identified tasks that could be paired, such as coordinating the old sofa collection with the new sofa delivery. Adding relevant emojis to the paired tasks in our Google calendar – the house move equivalent of Snap! – was surprisingly satisfying and brought a smile, rather than a groan, to our lips.

Next, we applied the strategy of ‘Don’t break the chain’. No matter what, we had to complete at least one task every single day – from signing our letting agreement to scheduling a big item collection from the council.

No day could be skipped, which was essential for two seasoned procrastinators.

Ticking off each day became addictive – adding an element of competition, with ourselves and with each other, that had been missing from previous house moves.

Maintaining our ‘streak’, a technique that had been taught on the course, also created a domino effect. Cleaning the kitchen cupboards energised us to dismantle the wardrobe. One box packed became two, then more.

Concentrating on the smallest domino helped us to push over the next. So packing up our pillows felt like the easy first level of a video game, while dragging our super king-sized mattress down two flights of stairs felt like confronting the final baddie.

Challenges are a key part of gamification, turning what you have to do into something you want to do, so we came up with our own ‘mini missions’.

The first was to completely empty our living room in under three hours – setting a deadline for Facebookers to collect the belongings we had advertised in freecycle groups. It became a race to beat the clock, just like on the gameshows.

Some unwanted items held value, but didn’t sell quickly enough. Instead of stressing over chasing buyers mid-move, we put them into storage to be sold at a future car boot sale. In gamification, this is known as the ‘kill’ strategy – dropping a task completely off your to-do list.

Our next goal was to get all our entertainment-related equipment set up in a single afternoon – arranging for three separate installation companies to arrive one after the other, relay-style.

The rule was that, by 6pm, all our systems had to be working together in harmony. By making a game of having our media equipment installed, a process that would normally drag on for weeks took only hours.

When boredom crept in, the ‘random task’ strategy injected novelty. We closed our eyes and pointed at our list – deciding blindfolded to try out mattresses in IKEA.

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To keep us focused, we each chose a reward (vinyl for Christian, books for me), which we could only claim upon completion of the move.

Of course, there were difficult times, such as trying to cover our old sofa with giant tarpaulin sheets in the front garden in a downpour. We searched half-heartedly for ways to ‘gamify’ the moment, but couldn’t push past the misery of the relentless rain.

Fortunately, while a crisis like this would have derailed our move completely in the past, the urge to maintain our ‘streak’ always kept us on track.

And when we handed in the keys to our old rental two days earlier than planned, it just proved how much gamification had changed us.

And we’ve proved that moving house really can be child’s play!

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