The Time Token Productivity System

That Drastically Improved My Life

Author

Maxim Li
February 02, 2024

This productivity system has solved these problems in my life:

  1. Procrastinating important tasks.

  2. Feeling guilty for relaxing.

  3. Too much screen time.

  4. Lots of goals not started.

  5. Poor sleep schedule.

  6. Easily distracted.

  7. Addicted to social media.

  8. And many more…

It’s called the Time Token System. Essentially it’s a gamification of life which has been very effective for me. So much so, that I believe it’s worth sharing with everybody.

How Does It Work?

In a single sentence: Productive work rewards you with Time Tokens, which you can use to spend time for entertainment.

▍Work

The main way of earning Time Tokens (TT), is by rewarding you for doing productive Work.

  1. 30 minutes of highly-productive work => 1 TT (Time Token)

  2. 30 minutes of medium-productive work => 0.5 TT

For me highly-productive work looks like this:

  • Studying (for university) — attending classes doesn’t count (I’ll get back to this under “Responsibilities”)

  • Fitness (working out at the gym)

  • Homework (for extracurricular Spanish classes I enrolled in)

And medium-productive work:

  • Skills (reading books, learning languages, etc.)

For example: After studying for 2 hours and reading a book for an hour, I will have earned 4×1 + 2×0.5 = 5 TT.

▍Entertainment

These TTs you can spend on entertainment of which there are 3 kinds:

  1. Productive entertainment — 20min per token

  2. Entertainment — 10min per token

  3. Poor entertainment — 5min per token

  • This three part distinction encourages you to break bad habits and rewards you for choosing productive alternatives.

For me, it looks like this:

  1. Productive entertainment: watching movies in Spanish.

  2. Entertainment: chatting on Discord, watching videos on YouTube.

  3. Poor entertainment: playing video games.

For example: With 5 TT I can choose to play video games for 25min (=5×5min), or much better watch a 1h40 (=5×20min) movie in Spanish.

▍Bonuses

Doing productive Work isn’t the only way you can earn Time Tokens. The second way to get more is through Bonuses, which reward you for building and maintaining good habits.

  1. Daily:

    • 0.5 TT for every daily habit you complete.

  2. Streaks:

    • If you maintain a daily habit for 1 week, you get a 1 TT bonus at the end of the week.

    • If you maintain a daily habit for 2+ weeks, you get a 2 TT bonus at the end of the week.

For example: If I go to bed before 11PM, I will receive a 0.5 TT bonus for completing that daily habit I’m trying to learn. If I successfully do this every day for 7 days, I will receive an additional 1 TT bonus after the 7th day. And if I keep this up for another 7 days I’ll receive a 2 TT bonus. For every week I keep this up I’ll be receiving 2 TT bonuses. If I end my streak, I’ll have to start over again with a 1 TT bonus the first week, then 2 TT bonus for all other weeks.

  1. Another Bonus is Compounding: The more productive Work in total you do in a day, the more extra TT you receive.

Time Spent (Today)

Highly-Productive Work (Extra TT)

Medium-Productive Work (Extra TT)

0 hours

0 TT

0 TT

2 hours

1 TT

0 TT

4 hours

1 TT

1 TT

6 hours

2 TT

1 TT

8 hours

2 TT

2 TT

10 hours

4 TT

2 TT

12 hours

4 TT

4 TT

For example: After 6 hours of studying and 4 hours of learning languages. I’ll receive an extra 3 TT bonus on top of the productive Work rewards.

▍Responsibilities

This system also takes care of your responsibilities. If you neglect your Responsibilities you get punished by losing TTs. Otherwise If you do what you have to do, you win TTs for spending your time responsibly.

  • Win:

    • Attendance — win 0.5 TT for every 30min of attending a responsibility.

  • Lose:

    • Negligence — lose 0.5 TT for every 30min of neglecting a responsibility.

    • Not caught up — lose 1 TT every day for every neglected responsibility not caught up.

Class attendance at my university isn’t enforced at all, for which this system helps enormously to attend responsibly, like so:

  • Win:

    • Attending class — win 0.5 TT every 30min of class attended.

  • Lose:

    • Missing class — lose 0.5 TT every 30min of class missed.

    • Postpone catching up a missed class — lose 1 TT every day for every class not caught up.

For example: After attending 3 sets of 2 hour-long University classes, I will have won 6 TT. If I had skipped those I would’ve lost 6 TT. And if I only caught up one missed set of class, I would still be losing an additional 2 TT per day, as long as I hadn’t caught up all sets of classes.

▍Guilt-Free Wallet

Every day is a new start, therefore you can only use TTs you’ve earned throughout the same day for entertainment. This is to avoid you saving up TTs and then spending an entire Tuesday doing nothing productive at all.

All of the TTs you haven’t used up at the end of the day get stored for later use, which you can then spend freely in the weekend.

The TTs you still had left after the weekend get converted to guilt-free cash. For every TT you saved up at the end of the week, you can spend guilt-free on whatever you wish, with a rate of (for example) €5 per token.

  • You’re not actually going to be earning money, but the point is that you’ll be guilt washing your own money into cash you can spend guilt-free!

For example: Let’s say I manage to save up 2 TT every day from Monday to Friday, then I’ll have 10 TT to spend in the weekend. If I’ve only used up 8 TT in the weekend and did some productive Work to earn another 3 TT. Then I’ll have 5 TT left over by the end of the week, which will be converted to €25 that I can spend guilt-free on whatever I want for being very productive throughout the week.

Summary

There’s EARN and SPEND.

▍EARN tells you how you can earn Time Tokens:

  • (1) Work — rewards you for being productive

  • (2) Bonuses — encourages you to build good habits

  • (3) Responsibilities — punishes you for neglecting responsibilities such as: classes, etc.

(1) Work

  1. highly-productive work — 1 TT per 30min

  2. medium-productive work — 0.5 TT per 30min

(2) Bonuses

  1. Daily — 0.5 TT for every daily habit

  2. Streaks — 1 TT or 2 TT bonus for maintaining a daily habit for 1 week or 2+ weeks.

  3. Compounding — up to 4 TT extra for doing more productive Work in total in a day.

(3) Responsibilities

  • Win:

    • Attendance — win 0.5 TT for every 30min of attending a responsibility.

  • Lose:

    • Negligence — lose 0.5 TT for every 30min of neglecting a responsibility.

    • Not caught up — lose 1 TT every day for every neglected responsibility not caught up.

▍SPEND tells you what you can spend Time Tokens for.

  • (1) Entertainment — Productivity is rewarded by TTs that you can spend on whatever entertains you.

  • (2) Guilt-Free Wallet — Saving up TTs is rewarded with guilt-free cash.

(1) Entertainment

  1. Productive entertainment — 20min per token

  2. Entertainment — 10min per token

  3. Poor entertainment — 5min per token

  • This three part distinction encourages you to avoid bad habits and rewards you for choosing productive alternatives.

(2) Guilt-Free Wallet

  1. You can only spend TTs earned during the same day.

  2. The TTs you did not use up at the end of day are stored, so you can freely spend them in the weekend.

  3. The left over TTs after the weekend get converted to guilt-free cash at the rate of (for example) €5 per token