SMART GOAL

My SMART goal is to reduce the amount of time I spend playing video games to a couple hours at most during the week. More specifially I’d like to get below 7hrs per week by the end of these 8 weeks. My motivation to do this is to increase my productivity. Countless times I have found myself wasting precious time playing video games when I could be much more productive doing other things. I’d like to spend the time I play video games to study more, do school work, and do my own work outside of school. Video games are a great way to reduce stress for me but I could be doing better things to promote my own wellness. Though this may not seem like that big of a problem. I personally think it has had a significant impact on my productivity so my perceived level of seriousness is quite high. The main startegy I implemented to deal with this problem is shaping or a gradual build up of attaining my goal. I would keep track of how many hours I spent playing video games everday and tell myself at the end of the week I will play less.

FACTORS

I have a number of predisposing factors to influence my change. I grew up playing video games and was to young to understand how addicting they can be. I now understand how they can have a negative influence on a persons life. My own personal belief that I can be doing better things to promote my well being than playing video games is probably the most influential predisposing factor for my change.

As far as enabling factors are concerned I think I have acquired a number of skills and abilities that allow me to make changes. I’ve set out many goals in life mostly related to sports and achieved them. In a lot of ways I can enable myself to change. My junior year of high school I started running track and I told myself I would jump certain heights on the high jump and went above and beyond my marks. I ended up being the state champion in my divison that year in the high jump and ended the season jumping the height I set out to jump 6’6 before getting injured at the MA state championship meet placing 3rd. The year after that I told myself I would get into a division 1 school to run track and did just that.

My reinforcing factors for change almost always come through support of friends and family. Stopping playing video games isn’t really something you would expect to get support for or anyone to really take too seriously. However my friends here have shown support for me wanting to stop and usually tell me to do something else with them when I’m spending too much time playing video games. With other things in life I have support almost always from both friends and family. I transfered from the UNiversity of Rhode Island to Plymouth State University and my parents fully supported my decsion even though people may have viewed it as me taking a step back. For me it was a leap forward and I got support for it.

The main barriers to my success is my work slowing down. I tend to play video games when I’m not busy so if my school work starts to become too easy or too little I start to play more video games. The main resource to my success is using the library. I’ve already picked up 3 new programming books through the interlibrary loan to keep myself busy when I don’t have work.

RECORD

Mean 10.625 Median 8.75

EVALUATION

I more than fully met my goal. Each week I would record how many hours total I played video games. Everyday I would put down how many hours I played in a notes section on my phone and then add them up after every week. I orginally only wanted to be playing video games for a little less than 1hr per day. Which was probably a little too generous of a goal. However either way towards the end of the project I was only playing for 2hrs per week. My mean number of hours played was also 10.67hrs per week during the whole process which is close to almost 1hr per day. The best solution for me to maintain this I think will be one not to buy a console to play video games on. One of the main reasons this becomes a problem is that friends of mine that I live with own video game consoles that I can play on. I’m graduating this December so I think I can easily manage to not do this. I’m much happier when I’m doing busy work than playing video games so I think keeping myself busy will be another factor to maintain this success. Which will come from my job once I graduate and me continuing to learn outside of school. I think a good take away from this project is something I have been familiar with a lot in life. Which is the idea that if you set goals and put in effort to accomplish these goals you can be successful, the only factor preventing these goals is time. I will continue to use this lesson throughout life to ensure my own wellness.