Turning Chores Into a Game
When you don’t feel like doing work, most likely you either just try to threaten yourself with a looming deadline, or put it off to another time or another person (!) However, for the true lazy bones Not it Labs, a start-up company from Birmingham, has come up with an app to make boring work fun.
According to Mashable.com, Not it labs has announced its release of an iphone app that makes real-world tasks seem like a game of tag. How it works is that when some chore needs to be done, say office supplies need to be restocked, or perhaps your mother wants you to take out the garbage, the app notifies the people who are responsible for completing it. Whoever is the last person to try and opt out of the chore, has to do it. But the more users complete tasks, the more ‘immunity’ they can earn, which they can then use to get out of the next task they are notified of. Users also earn badges based on the amount and type of tasks they complete.
Joshua Gilmer, CEO and founder of Not It Labs says "Games have mainly been used as an escape from reality and they don't actually help make reality any better. That's what we like about our app: It's not Farmville where it's a huge time-suck and you spend money on something that doesn’t exist. We are giving you the opportunity to use games to enrich your life instead of using games as an escape from your life."
Although the app feels similar to Task Rabbit, which uses money to reward users for completing tasks for the community, the CEO says that no money is involved on the app - instead it uses gaming mechanics and the user's social circle to create fun and effective incentives to actually get things done.
Not It was founded in October and has a staff of four including Gilmer. The
company is still working on the iPhone version of the app which they hope to
release in the next two months, and have planned to launch a kickstarter
campaign to raise money to develop an Android version as well.
