What’s a Side Quest, you ask? Well, it’s anything above and beyond your day-to-day necessities. Or maybe week-to-week necessities. Let’s be honest, they’re your Side Quests, so you have control over what goes on the list.
I’ll be honest, it wasn’t my idea. I saw an ad on Facebook for several days about Side Quest cards – a way to randomize chores you might not otherwise get to. Of course, when I went to look for them again all I found were litter box ads, and had no luck finding them through Google. I did, however, find this amusing article about a woman who gamified a chore list for her spouse.
How do I differentiate my Side Quests from my chores? I’ve defined as chores anything I do routinely on a schedule – cooking, changing the litter boxes, washing dishes, even the weekly laundry load. Those are always going to get done, and typically have a deadline of some sort, such as when I’m hungry or before I run out of clean underwear. (Putting laundry away though… that might be a Side Quest.)
Last Saturday, I completed several Side Quests and realized that some Side Quests are single tasks and others are a collection of tasks. Dropping donations off at Goodwill was a single task (creating the donations pile was more like a Quest though, and not entirely my own), but repairing the kitchen bookcase entailed multiple steps: empty bookcase, repair bookcase, wash the placemats and napkins that had been gathering dust on the bookcase, and repopulating the bookcase. (No, not with the cat, please don’t bump the wood while the glue is drying.)
The Side Quest I completed today was a detour when I went grocery shopping, to pick up carrot cupcakes at Smallcakes in celebration of what would have been my Dad’s 95th birthday. I realize they won’t be quite the same as the carrot cakes we used to get him at La Cenicienta, but the commute’s a bit far for that.