Habitica - Level up your lifestyle

Want to make a change in 2016?

Hey everyone, long time no see!
Like most people at the beginning of the year you may have decided to make some lifestyle changes for 2016. However most people, myself included, often find themselves with an initial huge burst of motivation that gradually dwindles away due to various distractions and laziness, we lose track.

There are a large number of apps and services out there to help you get organized but one in particular stood out for me - Habitica.
I freaking LOVE video games and Habitica offers you a way to 'gamify' your lifestyle, offering progressive challenges and rewards as you complete quests and tasks as you aim towards your life goals.

Previously known as 'HabitRPG', it is a free website service as well as a phone app. Anyone who has played an RPG before will feel immediately at home as you begin creating your avatar and as you level you can choose a class specialization such as a Warrior or Healer. You can defeat monsters, collect materials and earn equipment, skills and pets along the way!

Sounds good...but how in the hell does that help your productivity?

The key is in how you do damage to enemies and gain experience. In order to make progress you need to complete 'daily quests' as well as short term and long term missions. Above all, these are not provided by the game itself, they are created entirely by the character, you. Following the basic yet sufficient tutorial you can entirely customize your quests aka your 'to do' list in order to suit your personal needs.

A glimpse at my personal quest lines

Quests are split into 3 main categories:

1) Habits
These are good or bad habits that you passively want to encourage or discourage. Completing a positive task such as 'Wash up immediately after cooking' will reward you with experience and maybe an item. A negative habit such as 'Eat take away pizza' would cause damage to your character. With each 'consequential' completion the rewards/punishments will scale off in order to not be overpowered as it becomes an actual habit.

2) Dailies
These are the main focus of Habitica. These are habits and tasks that you actively want to complete on a regular basis. If these quests are not completed by the end of the day it will result in both you and your party taking damage for each individual task. It varies per person but it my case it includes tasks such as 'Review 3 kanji and its compounds', 'Exercise', 'Get out of bed immediately', 'Organize my work for the next day' etc. These can be as specific or as vague as you like.

3) To do's
These are your bigger, long term goals. Or those type of tasks that you won't get round to immediately but need doing. On my list right now I have 'Clean the inside of my PC' because it is WAY overdue. Other examples could be 'Pass license examination' or 'Lose 5 kg' and so on. These types of quests offer larger rewards depending the difficulty and if left to stagnate, gradually become more red compared to your fresher green tasks.

Each quest can be modified for difficulty or you can add time limits and specific days for them to appear. For example, '5 km Jogging' could be made to appear in your 'dailies' for Mon, Weds and Fri only.

Your character is displayed on the left, your party members on the right

Habitica has a very active community like any other good RPG. You can join parties and guilds and these allow you to challenge story quest lines together and defeat bosses with your accumulated damage. Other the other hand, if your party members fail a task, you will also suffer damage, therefore being in a party is a good motivator to complete each daily list!
The main positive aspect is that many groups are targeted to various lifestyles ranging from  office workers to fitness buffs or language students. You can help motivate each other and share tips for optimizing your goals, maybe make a real friend or two in the process! My current group contains an engineer, a law student and a tri-athlete!

The interface is relatively clear with cute pixel art, and the layout is constantly being tweaked to be more efficient. The party and social screens are a bit messy in my opinion but once you get used to it the navigation becomes second nature. Habitica could benefit from adding a separate chat tab as it currently displays party chat amongst the battle data and it feels a little disjointed.

But...does it work!?

Yes...and no.

Habitica offers a lot of incentives to help you stay motivated, equipment, special pets, exclusive pets and the damage system to name a few. The main drawback though is that there is NOTHING preventing you from cheating the system - whether by checking off uncompleted tasks to prevent party damage or creating trash tasks in order to boost your equipment and experience gains. Therefore Habitica's success strongly relies on the user's integrity, honesty and pure willpower to reach their goals.

Various monsters can be defeated with your group

I have been using Habitica for over 6 months now and while I started off really well, when my motivation began to slide I slowly fell into the trap of checking off a few uncompleted tasks just to prevent my party dying, DO NOT DO THIS as it totally ruins the purpose of Habitica.

There is a large wiki and forum that offers advice for optimizing your lists as well as various other tricks. You can also set yourself 'Rewards' that you can purchase with accumulated gold. For example if you lost 5kg then perhaps you could treat yourself to that take-away pizza...for 500 gold. Pass an exam? Treat yourself to a weekend spa...for 7777 gold and so on.
There is a mobile app to coincide with the website and it helps your to keep track and check things off as you complete them. It is nothing mind blowing but it gets the job done.

So many pets to collect! Each pet can also be turned into a mount with food, hence the progress bars.

I have revamped my list again for 2016 and have vowed to be more strict with myself, the deaths of myself and my party members be damned! One of my new tasks? CREATE BLOG CONTENT!!
2016 will be a year of change!

Give Habitica a try, its a fun new way to help improve yourself!