Improving Habits with Habitica

I’m quite a disorganized person – especially when it comes to work. I tend to juggle a lot of things at once and it’s hard to keep track of each of them. Working from home with an 8 month old child I find it hard to organise things from day to day. So I decided to look for a way to improve this.

I found Habitica. Habitica is a todo list and habit builder – that has turned the process into a game. I love gaming so turning a todo list into a game is a fun way to get me to check it daily.

Habitica characters and customizations

With Habitica you create an avatar, and then setup habits you want to complete. The interface is split into a series of sections:

  • You have habits – things you want to do occasionally and get rewarded (or punished) for doing. For example you can punish yourself for eating junk food, or you can reward yourself for doing the washing up.
  • You have dailies – things you should do every day. I have dailies for example eating 5 fruit or veg a day.
  • You to-dos – a more traditional task list.

The app works like a role playing game, so each time you complete a task, or a habit, you gain experience – and level up. If you miss a daily task, or a negative habit, then you lose health. As you level up new abilities unlock. You can also unlock eggs and other items to find pets.

It has all the hallmarks of an rpg – whilst also making me more productive. In the later stages you can fight monsters – but you have to do it as a group completing tasks to damage the enemies. Unfortunately I don’t know anyone else who uses Habitica so I haven’t tried this yet.

I really like the idea of gamifying habits. In particular forcing myself to do things that I always want to do – but don’t get around to doing. The threat of punishment for not completing a daily habit, even if the punishment is losing health in a game, is enough to make me actually take action.

Unfortunately the actual todo list items are not strong enough to use for a proper project management system. I was looking for something that would help me get organised for work – but I have ended up being distracted by a game (not for the first time).

To become more organised for work I need a better project management app. But for improving habits Habitica has proven a good choice and I am already seeing the benefits.

Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).

Related Posts

01 Jun 2011

A Day in the Life of a Web Designer

I recently had someone email me and ask what a day in my life, or that of a web designer, was like. A slightly unusual request but I thought I would take up the challenge and document an average day.I...
03 Aug 2016

Legend of Dad – A HTML5 Game made with Phaser

In April I entered the #LowRezJam, a game jam about making a game in a limited resolution. I had to make a game that fit within a screen that was 64×64 pixels. Quite small. I spent 5 days on it....
30 May 2005

My Next Game

I have been working on my next game for a while now. It’s going to be an updated version of Bubble Bomb. This may seem like a strange choice since Bubble Bomb is essentially ‘Yet Another Colour Matching Game’ (YACMG?)....
27 Oct 2017

Pixel Peak – a Teeny Weeny Skiing Game

The start of August this year brought with it the #LowRezJam. A game jam where game developers make games with a size limit of 64×64 pixels. That’s really small. Really really small.I took part last year, and really enjoyed it,...
12 Oct 2007

Roll – Flash Game

My blogging has been rather slow for the last few weeks. I have a number of small posts lined up for publishing but haven’t had the time to finish any of them. Thankfully it hasn’t just been laziness – I...
24 Jul 2005

New Game Release Soon!

I received the music for Bubble Blitz (ooh look – it has a name!) last weekend and adding it into the game has made everything seem much more complete. There are a couple of small bits of art to finish...