The Deck of Life: A Very Special Project
A long-term goal to help everyone live better lives!
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
It’s been a few years since I created the Deck of Life. Not that it existed in any format outside of my scrivener file for it, but it was there…haunting me…
To cut through the mystery: it is a card deck designed to help people accomplish daily tasks in a way that is engaging and non-threatening. It’s not quite full-on gamification, since you can’t score points or anything, but more in line with oracle or tarot card decks. The cards you pull determine (or gently suggest) your goals for the day, and there is no penalty for not hitting the mark. You just do over the next day.
What does that actually mean, though? Well, here’s a visual aid from the brand new website!
As you can see, there are different suits, such as “Peony” (hearth & home) and “Crown” (spirit & mind). There are six suits to chose from, which I designed to cover all aspects of life.
What is the point?
This is for anyone with any form of executive dysfunction, from mild to extreme. To be honest, that is most of us at one point in our lives or another. Someone who “has it together” can fall apart under the pressure of stressful events, even if they are good ones. From births to deaths, weddings to divorces, good jobs and bad jobs—we’ve all been at a stage in our lives where simple life tasks are hard to keep up with.
It was during one such period of life that I thought of this whole thing.
I was still working at FSU and deeply unhappy there. While I adored my colleagues and the students I worked with, the politics and corporatization of the school made it a very toxic environment. I was also trying to re-launch my author career, write, and start a “side hustle” to supplement my incredibly under-performing salary.
I stood on a street corner, walking Keely (RIP), feeling so overwhelmed I did not even want to go home (which Keely would have been fine with, she loved long walks!). I thought, “I wish there was a way to just pick a chore from a card deck and do that. Then I would not have to decide what to do next.”
My whole entire brain came to a screeching halt, and my very next thought was, “why not a card deck?”
The idea hit me almost fully formed. I went home, opened scrivener, and started outlining the deck, writing out the tasks, and creating the foundation for what will eventually become a full guidebook.
Now, a Website!
It stalled on the money front. I wanted a physical product to sell, but had no capital to invest. I considered Kickstarter to crowdsource it, but was unfamiliar with the process of creating a campaign. Normally that wouldn’t stop me, but I also knew I did not have enough social media traction to get people to support it.
And there it sat.
Until now!
Honestly, I knew what I wanted the website to look like and how it would function, but again, I did not have the money to hire programmers to build it. Everything seemed to be conspiring against me!
Then along came Claude.
Look, I know some of you reading this hate A.I. with the loathing of a thousand suns. You do you. I find it extremely helpful for project management and brainstorming and, now, website development. I outlined what I wanted, how I wanted it to look, what I wanted it to say, and how it would function. A few trials later, the website exists!
It’s early days yet, but I love that FINALLY the Deck of Life is available to people. Eventually, there will be a kickstarter so I can produce the actual cards, and hopefully the guidebook as well.
I invite you to try it out! We all need a bit of guidance now and again!
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Heads up! It took a “long” time for me to open. (Long enough that I decided it might be a Substack issue, copy and pasted the link in my browser and it came up straight away, both in Safari and in the app.) In fact, after I read about the suits and themes — at my current point in life this is a super cool idea, although I am a list person (I have a list that I pick something from each week for house chores for example) — I went back to choose another set of cards and it kinda hung again before finally loading.