I bet you've read about goal setting before and that goals are crucial to stop procrastination. Good goals should be challenging but not impossible to reach. Well here's what I think and I'm sure some people will get upset when they read this:
That's right. Challening goals aren't crucial to action. If they were, why would anyone play Solitaire on their computer or Snake on their phone? Where's the challenge in completing a game of Snake? What's the meaning?
Goals are important to create meaning and purpose. Goals are important to set a direction and they are important because they make us design what we want. But they don't make us act.
A game task has the right size to feel challenging. It's small enough to feel achieveable and big enough to make the outcome uncertain. Game tasks are also small enough not to discourage us from action.
By using this when you write your daily todo list, you can make action more interesting and motivating. Turning tasks into challenges can be done in many ways. Here's an example.
Assuming you have some task to perform, turn the task into a challenge by quantifying the action. You can
Games quantify every part of the experience. Games engage because they challenge us and make sure every challenge has a proper reward that can be used to conquer new challenges.