I love productivity.
I really enjoy finding any way to be a more efficient and productive individual. Naturally, I have read a majority of the best books on productivity and habit formation.
I have generated a system by which I keep myself motivated in a consistent and believable manner.
Enter;
✨The Bottle Cap Economy✨
In this post, I am going to teach you the bottle cap economy. Through explaining what makes the system tick and how you can workshop you’re own motivational system to get shit done.
Alright, let’s dive in 🙂
What is the Bottle Cap Economy?
The Bottle Cap economy is a system inspired by a lot of different sources, between James Clear’s Atomic Habits and Bethesda’s Fallout.
Basically, The Bottle Cap Economy is a system by which I reward myself with a certain amount of physical bottlecaps. I keep them in a big ‘ol jar with my tally for the month next to them on a whiteboard.
At the end of each month, bottlecaps I have saved from doing productive things are tallied up and equal a certain amount of cash that I can spend on whatever I want. Some past rewards include everything from a Ukelele to a Nintendo Switch (although the latter was multiple months).
This system allows me to reward myself for the hard work I make myself do. Whilst, also keeps me incredibly motivated as the physical act of dropping one of those blue goodies into the tally jar, is extremely rewarding.
How Does the Bottle Cap Economy Motivate You?
The system in essence is about creating a dopamine-inducing action to shorten the feedback loop between action and reward. The main problem with things like being consistent in the gym or writing every day has a delayed feedback loop where for example in the gym after one rep you don’t see a physical increase in muscle mass, no, you see that after months and months of consistency.
Which makes it hard to be motivated by such an ambiguous reward.
That’s where the bottle cap economy is (I’ve found) a very efficient system to motivate myself to do hard shit.
How do I create my own Bottle Cap Economy?
It’s easy really you just have to have a lot of one thing, some jars and some paper. The bottle caps can be anything from pennies to hairclips or those little plastic ducks (please do this one, that sounds awesome).
The second step is the hardest where you need to determine how much your time is worth. It’s not an easy task but if you find your hourly rate you can find how much 10 minutes of your time is worth. This is important as you use such an increment to be the basis for one cap, one hairclip or one duck.
In Conclusion. . .
Please give the Bottle Cap Economy a go, I would love to hear what you have to think about the system.
If you like productivity you may also like this post about how I get myself to do hard things;
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