Productivity Minesweeper

Navigating the minefield of instant gratification

I think Minesweeper was the first computer game I ever played. Back then it came preinstalled on Windows. Part of why I loved minesweeper was how easy it was. You just had to randomly click different squares until something exploded at which point you can restart the game and repeat the exact same thing. Lots of fun!

It took some years for me to realise what most of you have probably figured - the game wasn't easy, I just didn't know how to play. It turned out that avoiding the explosion was quite important to winning the game. Also you don’t have to blindly keep guessing mine locations, there is a way to predict them more systematically- when you click on a safe square, a number is revealed (this part I knew), these numbers are clues to how many mines are touching that particular square (this part I was blissfully unaware of). 

The 2 indicates that there are 2 mines touching that square. The 1s indicate that there is 1 mine touching that square.

Once I learnt the purpose of the numbers, the game began to make a lot of sense but something else also happened - minesweeper suddenly began to feel like a lot of work! 

(See the analogy to procrastination/productivity yet?)

The game soon began to resemble a painful treasure hunt. I had to read the clues, calculate the probability of where the mines were based on them, flag down all suspects and also do it as fast as possible with no casualties in order to win. What on earth did Microsoft think would be so entertaining about subjecting our brains to this kind of pressure?

It’s funny how I was wrong about the game on so many levels. Turns out that entertainment was not Microsoft’s chief agenda for Minesweeper, the game was actually a tutorial in disguise - they wanted people to learn how to use right and left mouse buttons (source), and also become more precise with mouse movements. It was clever and it worked.

Anyway, I was recently thinking about productivity (like I do on most days) and realised that battling procrastination is a lot like playing minesweeper. I wrote this post to share.

My minesweeper journey covered 3 variables: knowing, caring and trying, and I think these map quite well to the productivity space.

I. You just don’t know any better

Like I said, for the longest time, I thought minesweeper was about clicking away until that fateful, explosive click razed the board. I thought the game was based on luck back then, not skill or the know-how to calculate probabilities. 

This is also how my early years of procrastination worked. I was flying blind over a field filled with instant gratification mines. Before social media, it used to be reading, sleeping, more reading, movies. Then when Orkut first, Facebook later and Instagram recently came along, I walked right into all of their dopamine-sucking traps and had a good time there too. The dopamine hits felt like fun until keeping at it would blow up in my face. 

II. You know but you don’t ‘care’

Even after I learnt the rules of the game, I always found it hard to be a disciplined sweeper. Because being a serious sweeper would mean getting better at playing the game with time. Which won’t happen unless I put in the work, play regularly, learn from my mistakes, improve my time, and earn my way to the intermediate and difficult levels. But I would tell myself that I don’t care about getting better at minesweeper. 

This is often what happens with us procrastinators, no? We prefer to attribute our failures to a lack of motivation than a lack of effort. 

“If I try, I can obviously do anything better than the other mortals. But I just don’t care enough.” - almost every procrastinator that I have come across has a self-narrative that is some version of this.

At the heart of this narrative is a fear of failure. We have been told all our lives that we are going to accomplish great things in life because we are brilliant or one of its synonyms but sooner or later we realise that brilliance alone is not going to get us anywhere in life. We realise that we need to work hard just like everybody else to translate our brilliance into success. This hits hard because our understanding was that working hard is for the not-so- bright people, brilliant folks succeed regardless.

It makes total sense why for most of us, our list of abandoned goals is way longer than our list of completed goals. It also makes sense why the ones who kept trying (never mind what their IQ was or wasn’t) got better at it.

Did you know that the current world record for Minesweeper Beginner level is 1 second? I take longer to blink.

You can see how carelessly I played the game here despite knowing. I did put in some, albeit miniscule effort into calculating where the mines maybe, even flagged a few. But I wanted to get it over with fast (this is when I’m playing the game for the first time in years!). The consequence was natural as it was predictable - I got irritated, started clicking away randomly and lost quickly. I am now thinking how 6 right in 14s is actually not bad at all against the current world record of 1s, that I could have done worse (classic downward counterfactual thinking that is characteristic of procrastinators).

Knowing is the easy part. I’ve said this before- we don’t reel our life away because we don’t know that Instagram is bad for us, we reel despite it. We know exactly what watching that first Youtube video will do, we still do it and then retroactively regret it. It’s a sorry state that most procrastinators including myself find themselves repeatedly in - where despite knowing the outcome, we continue to indulge almost maniacally in our choice of cheap dopamine. We find it easier to intentionally fail than deliberately lose. 

When we realise that a task takes effort and time, our brain starts twitching. When perseverance seems impossible, we abandon the task in public and wallow in private.

Instead (and this is the part we struggle with the most), if we try to break through, prepare ourselves to brave the failures, learn and keep trying, the game will begin to feel more in our control. We may still lose but as long as we don’t take it too personally and keep going, the results will start showing.

III. You know, you care and you try

The path to winning minesweeper is marked by discipline and consistency. The ideal sweeper enjoys the effort that goes into mastery and welcomes new challenges in their pursuit to reach a place of accurately detecting and avoiding all detonations. And with practice, the game does get easier with time.  

In real life, this can look like quitting Instagram or Reddit, instituting a healthy meal prep system, avoiding screens a few hours before bed, priming our workspace to be distraction-free. The effort feels painful at the beginning but if we keep at it, we get better at both learning where the instant gratification mines are lurking and flagging them for ourselves. 

I sincerely tried to play this one. You can tell by the time (top right hand side). It took me 205 seconds to flag 8 mines, 2 of which were incorrectly flagged. I lost because I haven’t played the game in years and still need to learn a lot more. But if I keep practising, I know I will get better. 

IV. Final Words

The real world consequences of being callous about minesweeping are a lot more dangerous than losing at a computer game (the 1-sec guy may disagree). Chasing instant gratification can profoundly impact our wellbeing and quality of life, many of us can personally attest to this. 

The issue unfortunately is not a lack of awareness, it is a lack of consistent effort. We scroll and scroll while labelling social media as the adulterator of our ability to focus. We consume mindlessly while blaming capitalism for our unquenchable thirst for goods. But if our hunger for cheap dopamine is so ravenous as it seems to be, won’t we helplessly keep seeking it no matter what the economic and social system is? (Procrastination existed much before the internet.)

This is perhaps hard to accept for many of us, but even in a world filled with instant gratification mines, we can still play the game well. We can navigate the deluge of cheap dopamine sources, calculate the probability of our emotional survival should we choose to take a certain path, and flag the parts of us that we know will implode should we let loose. 

My past self would disagree but present me finds this way of playing productivity minesweeper entertaining as hell.

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Links to previous productivity posts:

1. The Magic of Weekly Reviews

2. An ode to productivity

3. How to get on the productivity wagon

4. Productivity Basics