Monday Dispatch – 2024/03/18

Are You Playing The Game Or Is The Game Playing You?

Welcome to Monday Dispatch — or rather another Monday Dispatch sent on Tuesday — a bonus publication for premium subscribers with additional notes, deep dives, reading recommendations, and business updates.

Before getting started, here’s a question for you: What are your favorite newsletters? I’m particularly interested in “hidden gems” with which to possibly collaborate. Thanks!

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As regular readers will remember, at the start of the year I got a Garmin workout watch to better track the runs and swims I had begun doing with regularity.

I wanted something to give me insights and, hopefully, keep me motivated.

It worked. The data the watch collects and plots is a useful guide for an amateur athlete and full-time nerd such as myself.

Together with the data and insight came something unexpected.

The badges.

The Garmin engineers have done a fine job at gamification. There are badges for all sorts of activities. You can earn them by completing challenges, like 1 mile a day for 30 days, reaching milestones, improving your VO₂Max score, or by taking “social” actions, like connecting with friends or sharing a workout.

I got hooked.

I scrolled through the badges list, reading the detail of each badge and plotting my moves to obtain it. I put together a spreadsheet to know how many steps I’d have to do each day to gain the monthly steps badge. If I couldn’t get 10,000 steps in before dinner, I’d go out for walks after the kids fell asleep.

Then came the February 15K challenge.