The Spirit of Play: Side Quests, Challenge and Play Personality
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
The first energizer in Feel-Good Productivity, aimed at work you cannot escape but can change the feel of. Instead of disengaging or quiet quitting, you deliberately import the mechanics of games: optional side quests that let you follow curiosity, a self-set challenge calibrated so the task is neither trivial nor crushing, and a chosen play personality — one of eight archetypes drawn from Stuart Brown's 5,000 play histories — that you adopt for a given piece of work. Ali's claim is that a small amount of extra effort spent making a task fun returns far more energy than it costs, and that the resulting positive emotion makes you measurably more creative and productive.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Spot where you're clock-watching
Identify the parts of your week where you disengage, do the bare minimum, and wait for 5pm. Boredom and quiet quitting, not intensity, are usually where play pays the highest return.
Watch out Disengaging for eight hours a day so you can enjoy the evening costs you most of your waking life.
- 2
Find a side quest
Pick an optional project alongside the main storyline of your job — something that follows a curiosity nobody assigned you. It adds variety and gives you something in the day that is genuinely yours.
Pro tip The best side quests fix something everyone complains about and nobody owns.
- 3
Manufacture a challenge at the right level
Nothing is fun against a three-year-old or against Roger Federer. Where the task is too easy, invent a constraint or target that makes it interesting — a personal game inside the job.
Pro tip Choose a game that also helps whoever you work for, so nobody has a reason to stop you.
- 4
Choose a play personality for the task
Work out your own play archetype from what you loved as a child, then deliberately adopt one — storyteller, jester, director and so on — when approaching a specific piece of work, and ask how that character would do it.
Pro tip For a boring presentation, take the storyteller: what's the story, the three-part structure, the joke?
Watch out You're not stuck with one archetype; different circumstances suit different sides of you.
- 5
Change the context around the task
Soundtrack, location and scenery are cheap levers. A film score while writing, a walk and a coffee shop instead of the desk, headphones for the chores.
Pro tip Adding variety is itself the mechanism — the same task in a new setting feels new.
- 6
Ask 'how can I make this fun?' in the moment
Make it a reflex on any task that feels like a chore — dishes, laundry, admin. The answer is usually trivially small, and the mood shift carries into the next few hours of work.
In the wild
Matthew, now an author, spent twelve-hour days on a McDonald's drive-through and found it boring. He invented a game: each day he'd try to upsell customers on a different sauce, gently insisting the barbecue was worth it and citing the last happy customer until they gave in. Customers weren't expecting it, and it lightened their day too.
→ He turned a monotonous shift into a self-scored game while raising the drive-through's revenue, which kept his manager happy.
A friend of Ali's, a psychiatry trainee, was frustrated by the hospital's terrible computer systems — a complaint every doctor makes and nobody acts on. She went down to the basement where the IT team worked and simply asked what was going on. It turned out IT wanted to talk to doctors but didn't want to disturb them, and doctors were too busy to talk to IT, so systems ended up weirdly designed.
→ She created a side project that made her day job enjoyable again and objectively improved the systems for colleagues and patients.
Dr Julie Smith described working a supermarket checkout with five or ten dead minutes between customers on quiet days. She used the little slips of card receipt paper stored by her seat to speed-write mini poems and anecdotes, seeing what she could produce before the next customer arrived.
→ The monotony passed faster and she was challenging and entertaining herself within the tight restrictions of the job.
Common mistakes
Quiet quitting a job you can't yet leave
Doing the bare minimum until 5pm means living eight hours a day as a zombie. Disengagement makes the time feel worse, not better, and removes the very levers that could improve it.
Assuming play means not taking the work seriously
Ali's framing is sincere rather than serious — Nobel laureates and neurosurgeons still do high-stakes work, they just carry less heaviness while doing it.
Believing the only fix is to quit and follow your passion
Quitting isn't attainable for most people right now. There is a lot to try with play, power and people before concluding that leaving is the only option.
From the transcript
“one specific strategy in play for example is um you know in video games they've got the concept of side quests”
“so the way he created a challenge for himself was he would try and upsell the customers on a different sauce every day”
“we don't stop playing because we grow old we grow old because we stop playing”
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