Last updated March 16, 2024

My Quest Board

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What is my quest board and why I recommend one

My quest board. It is a cork board with various index cards and notes stuck to it. Notes incude my goals, positive affimations, and my current goals with stickers underneath indicating I have completed the task

What is my quest board and why I recommend one

My quest board is my attempt at motivating myself to complete day to day tasks that I have decided are important. This thing is constantly changing around, however I keep the key concept the same. My gf has modified this system for herself and uses it as well. I love gamifying chores and tasks. I used to be a big Habitica fan, but I could never make it stick for more than a month or so. It is too easy for me to forget and ignore tasks on my phone. According to pictures on my phone I started this Nov 28th, 2023. I can barely stick with organizing systems for a month, so the fact that I have kept this up for so long is very exciting for me. The most important thing to keep me working on this is that it is:

Easy to see - This board is near the area I spend the most time in my room. I can easily look up and see what I have and have not done today without needing to physically get up. It is large, eye-catching, and has fun fairy lights around it that I can turn on at night.
Avoids becoming over complicated - My ADHD brain wants to do all the tasks, but my energy levels know that isn’t possible. I use large index cards to make everything easily visible, and it means I can use my fancy stickers, but it also means I can only fit about 5-6 quest cards on there at a time (I recommend starting with only 3-4 at most).
Engaging to my interests - I love stickers. This board gives me a great reason to use them. It is fun to flip through my sticker books at the start of the week and pick out a few sheets to use. I feel happy looking up and seeing some of my favorite stickers all in one spot. My gf uses a lot of holographic and shiny stickers on her board. She likes the look, but also she notices her board more often because of the light reflecting off the stickers.
Customizable and changeable - I can swap out tracked tasks easily. It only involves me writing something on a notecard and slapping it up there. I keep my notecards and post it notes near my work area so they are easy to grab. If I find it is getting stale to look at I could move the board to a different area or change around the way it is organized.
Accountability - If my board is visible for me, that means it is visible for others. My gf and I check in with eachother once a week about our goals and tasks in general, and checking if we are remembering to do our tasks/reward ourselves for it helps keep me on track
Intermittent rewards - I get a daily reward of getting to put a pretty stickers on my board showing I did my tasks! Once I collect 10 stickers on a card I get a small prize or get to put some money away into savings for bigger prizes. I will come back to this later, but I generally try to make my prizes things that are very exciting that I normally wouldn't get for myself, or I save towards spending money on a special interest. The rewards need to be actually rewarding to keep your brain engaged!

Recommended Supplies

One thing that is nice about these is that they are super cheap to make. The most expensive thing is going to be the cork board, but they are actually way cheaper than I expected. I paid ~$8 for mine. The rest are items you might already have, or you might have something you could substitute in its place.

Cork board: This is honestly kinda optional. You could put it on the side of your fridge, tape stuff directly to your wall, whatever. I liked the cork board because ~~it was on sale~~ it gives me a contained work surface and it can be in my bedroom.
Task/Chore cards: I use large, blank index cards for this. You could get fancy and cut up some pretty cardstock, or you can just reuse whatever scrap paper you grab out of the recycle bin.
Some way to track what you completed: I use stickers. You could draw little doodles. You could use a fun stamp. You can just make a check. Whatever motivates you. I love to collect stickers! Getting to look at and use stickers is very motivating to me.
An idea of what you will reward yourself with: Optionally you can write it down on your quest board as well. I will address rewards and my ideas for them in the next section.

Optional supplies

Fancy decorations: I repurposed a string of fairy lights I had to frame around my board. You could do something similar with some yarn or strung beads. You could glue little decorations around your frame. Repurpose supplies from other crafts whenever you can! Think about adding things that will draw your attention and make you want to look at your board.

Similarly, you could pin art, positive affirmations, reminders, and other things you like looking at to your board. I keep a reminder note of my current goals, some positive affirmations about something that I am struggling with, and I also keep the latest doodle my gf has given me on there.

Ideas for Rewards

This is a part where you might wanna get a pen and paper. Jot down some of your current interests, things you like, things that could motivate you. Think about things you think are fun, but you don’t often get yourself. Maybe something where you don’t want to stop yourself from having it, but you would like to make getting it feel more rewarding. This can start to help shape some ideas for rewards for you.

Rewards are a very personal choice, I do not want anyone to feel like they can’t try this out because they are on a tight budget. My current situation allows me to use money as a reward, but there are plenty of other things you can choose as a reward as well. What about earning a movie night? (Most libraries have DVDs they rent for free) Some extra gaming time? Celebrating getting closer to meeting your goals with a loved one? A spa day where you get to use one of those fun bath bombs you have been saving for the right time? Think about things you already enjoy doing or things that you save for “something special”. Can you reframe doing them in a way that makes them feel like a reward?

I choose to save a couple dollars from each card I fill. When I finish a card I transfer a couple dollars to a savings account, and this is the money I mostly use for buying Monster High and Legos. It ends up creating a double reward. I am rewarded when I put money in my savings. I am rewarded again when I get to spend the saved money on something I like. I am pretty good at impulse buying toys, so this system allows me to still buy the things I like, but curb how often I am spending money on it.

Another idea that I had, but never followed through with; Having several small rewards on hand that I could exchange a card for to get an instant reward. Small items like fidget toys, fun stationary, cheap blind bags, and trading card booster packs are things I would keep in mine.

Consider how often you should give yourself bigger rewards. You might have to play around to find what feels right. For me, doing a task 10 times felt like a natural number. You want it to feel motivating without being too easy that it becomes boring, but you don’t want it to take too long between rewards that you just end up saying “fuck it”

Towards the start you will probably be finishing all your task cards around the same time, but as time goes on they might become more desynced. This also helps keep it rewarding as I am getting a new reward at least once or twice a week instead of having to wait almost 2 weeks in between reward times.

A small note that I wish to include; cw: Talk of disordered eating I would personally recommend being careful with using food as a reward. Maybe you can make getting a fancy treat from a local chocolate shop be a reward, but that does not mean you should stop letting yourself have treats unless they are a “reward”, ya know? Younger me was bad at withholding certain foods from myself unless I “earned” them, and it hecked up my relationship with food for a long time. You don’t gotta do that to yourself.

Various Tips

This is just some ramblings I have about this system that didn’t quite fit in the other sections. You don’t really need to read this, but you can if you want to hear my ramble for a bit longer.

Don’t be afraid to change it up! I change out my tasks all the time. The only task that I am still doing from my original set up is reading for 30 minutes. Otherwise I change it up as I see fit. Maybe I think I am doing something often enough that I don’t need to remind myself to do it for now. Maybe a new interest has popped up and I decided I want to focus on that over something else. Or I am just not enjoying a task anymore. I do try and fill a task card two times before I change it to something else, but this isn’t a hard rule for me.

An example of failure; when I first started my quest board, I had a task card for vacuuming. I still did not vacuum. I told myself every time I filled the card I could have more money than I normally would reward myself. I still did not vacuum. You see, I hate vacuuming. Giving myself a reward will not change how much I hate vacuuming. I will simply not vacuum until I can’t stand the feel of the carpet and then I’ll vacuum. Idc if that makes me grody, I hate the vacuum. *long inhale* Back to my point; I just let myself cut my losses when the card was mostly full, gave myself the reward, and replaced it with a different task. Seeing that task that I dreaded doing every day on my board was just causing frustration towards the whole system. I decided that vacuuming wasn’t worth screwing up a whole system that was otherwise working for me.

Generally I try to avoid having any house care tasks on my board now. I have a separate chore sharing system with my gf that works well for us and I don’t really feel like I need rewards to do those ~~for the most part~~. Instead my quest board is mostly tasks that focus on self care and goals. I think of house chores are something I do for my family, while these are things I am doing for myself.
I used to have a note of small rewards on my quest board, but I have since removed it because I was running out of space. Idk if anyone else is like me, but sometimes I need to be reminded of the things I like and find enjoyable lol. This was just a list of things I could do daily as a mini reward for finishing my tasks, like extra video game time, restyling a monster high doll, taking a nap, playing with the cats/dog. I purged it since I didn’t find it creating any additional motivation to finish my tasks, but wanted to include a blurb about it in case someone else may need more frequent smaller reward ideas.
There is a lot of potential to gamify this further if that sort of thing is motivating to you. You could theme the whole board around a special interest.
Don’t feel bad if you try a task system that in the end doesn’t work for you!! For years I would beat myself up when I found the “perfect” task/organization system that would surely fix my life, only to completely forget what I was doing a couple days later. If you try this system and it doesn’t stick with you, just move on. You can try it again if you want, but you are under no obligation to keep using it if it doesn’t jive with ya. No shame, no guilt. Nothing in this system is expensive or has to be too time consuming. If it doesn’t work out, you have a cool cork board you can use for sticking fun photos of your blorbos on.

And I think that about wraps it up! I might come back and add additional tips or notes if I think of them, but that is all I have to say for now! I hope you found this helpful :)