The author has been playing Mario Kart with their partner during the pandemic, and discovered a new competitive aspect in time trials, where they compete against their previous best times. This experience led them to evaluate how they stay motivated at work, and realized that they needed to find a way to make their daily tasks more engaging and challenging. They found inspiration in applying this approach to their personal productivity by creating automated workflows using Zapier, specifically a "Personal Best Tracker" Zap that competes against their previous performance.