HabitRPG

As I have mentioned, I am a procrastinator by nature. That was part of the reason I started this blog. It was going to force me to regularly update it by its mere existence. And thus far, it has succeeded in that. Since I started this little experiment back in 2012, I have completed 43 games. Not too shabby.

When I have things I want to do, I either have to trick myself into doing them or they have to be written down somewhere to remind me constantly, or they'll just get stashed away somewhere in the recesses of my brain, along with my 4 years of German, to become dusty and forgotten. To keep this from happening, I'm always making To-Do lists. I'm a To-Do list junkie. It started with Sticky Notes. A bunch of things are scribbled on a Sticky Note, complete it, cross it off, and if I cross em all off, I get to experience the joy of throwing the note away. Problem is, if you don't keep on top of it, the Sticky Notes just keep piling up, and once they reach critical mass, I can ignore them as well as anything else.

Enter the app "Errands". It's kind of amazing. You can split everything up by project. I can set To-Do items to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly. I started off strong, and probably used this app hardcore for a solid year. Problem is, the digital version of the Sticky Note problem happened. I made too many projects and had too many things to do, and I included too many long range To-Dos that couldn't be dealt with quickly. These needed to be broken down into smaller bitesize chunks, but it's trading one variety of brain overload for another.

Recently, Todoist entered the picture. Really, it's pretty much the same app only it looks more minimalist, and it tracks how many tasks you complete in a day and charts it. This is mildly interesting from a worthless statistics point of view. The more tasks you complete, the more points you get and the higher level you become as well. I'm at the level of Professional as of this writing, with 314 tasks completed, and 6582 points...or karma levels, or whatever the hell they call it. What does this mean? Nothing. What does this get me? Nothing. It's trying to make a game out of it, and it works slightly, but if I'm not careful, it's gonna look like my Errands app that has 147 tasks sitting and waiting for me to do while I hide it under the couch and pretend it's not there.

Now there's this thing called HabitRPG. I just started using it this week, so it will be a bit of an experiment. It's just another To-Do list really, but it takes that gaming element further. You have a little pixel avatar that represents you. You can equip various armor, weapons, add pets, etc. by buying them with gold. You earn gold by completing real world tasks. There are three varieties of tasks: Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos.

Habits are things you want to do regularly. Some of the things I have here are Take the Stairs, Fix Supper at Home, Get 8 Hours of Sleep, and Make the Bed. I'm trying my damnedest to not eat out so much, so I can save money, and I never get enough sleep. These are definitely habits that I want to build. Taking the stairs is just an easy points type thing, and making the bed is something I would NEVER do otherwise, but it's easy and I'm glad when it's done, so it forces me to do it. Habits will stay there until you actively delete them. Pressing the + button when you do the task will give you some gold and XP, and pressing - when you fail to do that task will cause your HP to take a hit. You can also set up purely negative habits to dissuade you from doing them. (They have Eating Junk Food on there as an example.)

Dailies are things that you plan on doing every single day. The things I have here involve exercise, reading, and working on personal projects. If I fail to complete my dailies, I'll take a shot to my Health Points at the end of the day, but each completion nets me some XP and cash. These will reset each day.

To-Dos are your standard one-off things that you'd write on a Sticky Note. Add it, when you complete it, check it off, and it goes away, giving you get XP and monies. One thing I really like about these is the ability to add a checklist to a To-Do. If I need to do this one overarching thing, but it has multiple steps, I can add each step in the checklist and keep them together as one To-Do, but I'll be rewarded for each step I complete.

Why the hell do I want money and XP anyway? Well, you can get quests and fight monsters, and you want to be a high level and have better gear in order to fight said monsters. You'll attack them by completing Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos while you're in the midst of a battle. You can do this solo or with a party of your friends. If you, or someone in your party, doesn't complete their dailies, the monster will have a chance to attack. This makes you want to complete your dailies as to not fuck over your friends, and if you do complete them, your attacks will help take down the beastie and get your group some fat stacks and XP. This has, thus far, been a compelling reason to get stuff done.

Another added incentive is that when you haven't done a task in a while, it will go from green to yellow and to red if you slack off on it for several days. I like the psychology of this because I feel compelled to get rid of anything red. Red means I'm failing. I've only been using this website/app for a short while, but I've surprisingly gotten a shit ton done. Easy things that I'd usually put off until the next day, I'm doing immediately. Things that I hate to do and NEVER do, like making the bed, I'll complete just because it's easy. And hopefully this will get me used to doing these various things each day, that it will become less and less of a struggle to decide to do them.

I think HabitRPG will only work for a particular brand of crazy person. This person must have the desire to accomplish things, and they must also be opposed to cheating in the very depths of their soul. It would be incredibly easy to cheat at this game, but if your role-playing style is more toward Lawful than Chaotic, you may have a brand of To-Do list that will keep you in line.

Only the days to come will prove if I can keep up this up or if it will become another one of my failed productivity experiments.