This week’s pick of the week is for the writer – actually it’s for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of who they are… but be warned: it involves writing.

I’ve been using this site for awhile now, and I personally love it. I think, perhaps, my obsession has something to do with the fact that the site uses a badge system – clearly gamification works for me.

Here’s the concept: In Julia Cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way,” she introduced a concept called morning pages. Morning pages are essentially three pages of mind throw-up that you commit to putting down on paper every day. I can type much faster than I can write, and I find it easier to keep up with my thoughts on a screen format. Because you’re visibly writing along with several other people, my motivation to complete the pages is also increased.

As I mentioned before, the best part about the site are the badges. There are two categories of badges: streak badges and behaviour badges. The streak badges start out with writing 3 days in a row and go to writing 100- 500 days in a row. I’m very excited, because today I earned my 100 days in a row badge.

You get the behaviour badges for such things as completing your morning pages before 9am 10 days in a row, writing your pages in under 20 minutes 10 days in a row, writing 50,000 words in one month (badge pictured below – I worked hard to get this one), and for writing 100,000 to 250,000 words all time. So far I’ve only achieved the former.

You can also get a badge for completing one of their monthly challenges. This is one of my favourite features on the site. Every month you have an opportunity to sign a one month challenge contract where you commit to writing every day for an entire month. If you succeed you make a promise to treat yourself to something (like a manicure or movie night) and if you fail you commit to do something you don’t enjoy. Not only is this great motivation, but it’s also great fun.

FINALLY, the best part about this site is it tracks what you’re writing about (you can’t get this from writing in a notebook). The site tracks the words that you are using in order to give you an analysis of where you’re heads at. So far, I’ve found this system to be fairly accurate.

It also helps me to switch my mindset. My current mood really comes through when I’m writing my pages and, because you can’t change if you don’t know there’s something wrong,  this system lets you know when there’s something wrong so that you can start to change your focus. For awhile, my mindset while writing consistently came up as negative. It’s because I was aware of this fact that I was then able to change not only what I wrote about, but also what I thought about.

So there you have it. That’s my pick of the week.

Visit 750words.com to sign up for your own account.

Cheers.