How Cookie-Clicker Teaches You Peak Productivity and Performance
Y’know what Cookie-Clicker and those clicker games are like. Endless spamming and getting upgrades until you reach the decillions (1 with 33 zeroes for those who don’t know). But there are lessons that these clicker games can teach, for 2 types of people who click on this article in particular, that is:
- Those who consider themselves unproductive and underperforming
and,
2. Those who overwork and burn themselves out faster each time like an any% speedrun
Now I say this but both of these people are pretty similar but miss a few important facts of clicker game theology. That is, that you need to click and that you need to reset every once in a while. In real life, you need to work and rest in order to be able to sustain yourself whilst reaching greater heights and breaking previous limits.
People tend to grind and grind and as this goes on people’s productivity tends to tank despite the hard work they’ve put out. Similarly, at a certain point in clicker games you reach your limit and growth from henceforth is minimal.
That’s why you should reset. Resetting in clicker games removes your progress but provides you with a stronger base that allows you to reach your peak faster and extend beyond. This is the same with real life, by resetting every time you’ve reached a peak you will have a stronger core that will reach new personal records for yourself. But people are scared even in clicker games because of losing their progress which they’ve worked so hard on, but trust me, sometimes the best things in life can only be discovered through a leap of faith.
But this suggestion always comes with the response, “But I can’t travel/I’ll get lazy.” To this I say two things, 1. You don’t need to travel internationally on a long vacation in order to reset, all you have to do is put yourself in an unfamiliar environment for a few days and do something you like or are scared of [aka (extreme) sports, a long trip to the countryside or visiting lots of friends and family].
2.
What do you see in this graph? What I see is Cookie-Clicker. What I mean is, at the beginning you have to work hard and tap at it, there’s no other way around it (except with hacks but that’s a different story) and this extends to life. The hardest part about procrastination and doing work is starting it, and everyone is suggesting all these things on how to beat procrastination, watch motivational videos but Cookie-Clicker has it down to a science.
Just click.
That’s it, just do the work, do it now and do it regularly. That’s the only advice that will get people to do it but often enough is the one people follow the least.
There’s also another thing that Cookie-Clicker shows you. That the optimal way of productivity and performance is to do less of it over time. In clicker games, at the beginning you have to click a lot, but over time your clicks become less powerful to the point where clicking on it makes a negligible difference. The same occurs after a reset where clicking becomes important for a short duration but nevertheless becomes redundant.
Real life is the same.
Optimal Performance involves putting hard work and effort in the beginning and decreasing this momentum later on until it becomes baseline (for students this could be just revision/being months ahead and for office-workers it could be just your daily tasks without big operations or being a week/month ahead).
For students I emphasise this because the holidays are a great time to do a lot of work which may sounds counterintuitive but these few months can alleviate the rest of the year. This is because you are putting a little bit of stress in a time where you don’t feel stress and can thus study easier without any other thoughts about other assignments et cetera.
Thus if you follow that graph in the beginning and put in a lot of effort in the beginning, in the later aspects of the year where you and everyone else would be stressfully grinding theory, practical, practice exams and whatnot, you can do what you need to do whether its a daily revision and a practice exam and call it a day. Therefore since your putting stress during a non-stressful time, you remove the stress during the stressful times, decreasing stress overall.
Bit roundabout eh.
One last thing I’d like to add is that just like in clicker games where every time you reset you have to put a little work in to get the momentum the same works in real life so for those who fear being lazy and losing this momentum, all I can say is make yourself do the work and over time as you do more resets, you will get the momentum faster and it won’t be something you are scared of anymore.
Also meditate. If you find yourself having a lot of spare time since you did all of the work beforehand, try new sports, arts, entrepreneurial activities, hobbies, clubs and meditate since that will also boost your mental health and performance as a bonus.
We aren’t robots, so as much as sustainable routines are nice, we need breaks and we also need less stress. That’s why you should follow the Cookie-Clicker strategy.
Thank you for reading,
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Cheers,
Joseph Basu
