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Status: Tags: Links: Using Habitica for a Week Video Project - Habitica Features

Using Habitica for a Week Thoughts

Introduction

clips of doing tasks

• In this video, I’ll be showcasing my one week experience of using Habitica to gamify and organize my day-to-day life. I’ll share my personal thoughts, benefits, and workflow to help you determine whether Habitica is for you. If you’re looking to level up in life (oh god I actually said that), be sure to watch until the very end.

Preparation/First Thoughts

• Right now I’m feeling a bit disorganized, as I need to balance the current projects I’m working on with some studying time during finals week. Hopefully Habitica can help me find balance and success in a rather busy time of my life.
• When creating my account and using it for the first time, I liked how simple and natural the ui was. I wish there was a dedicated dark theme, seeing as my only option is to use my google chrome extension. it looks wack for now but i fix it later
• I wasn’t expecting much, but now I can see the potential of Habitica
  • I really enjoy how there’s a section for to-dos, dailies, and habits, as well as potential collaboration with friends
  • However, I’ll have to figure out what to do with features like tags and rewards
• Habitica’s main selling point is the gamification, but honestly, I’m not that entranced by it
  • I’ll see if it grows on me throughout the week

Setup

• Habits
  • The touching face one is gonna kill me
  • I don’t really have any repetitive habits throughout the day, so I decided to just tailor it to the ways I use my breaks
    • I have a habit setup to keep track of whether I use my breaks productively, or if I procrastinate
• Dailies
  • As of now, I plan on using dailies to make sure I spend enough time on certain goals and categories throughout the day.
    • Copied from my weekly review in Obsidian, I created a task for each daily time allocation I had
    • This includes studying for my upcoming finals, staying fit, javascript, videography, and learning things through reading or skillshare
• To dos
  • At the moment I don’t have much todos, but I plan on using this for keeping note of small things I need to do throughout the day
• Tags
  • Since I like to alternate between work and break sessions throughout the day, I thought it would be handy to have tags for tasks I can do during break and tasks I can do during work periods

Week Reflections

Day 1 - Eagerness?

• The incentive to carry out my tasks for the sake of this video helped me stay on track and complete all my dailies
• So far, I’ve had no issues with the user interface or workflow of the app. Adding and completing tasks were quick and simple.
• Interesting enough, I found an exploit where you can continually get eggs if you spam-toggle a task. I wasn’t actively trying to cheat the system, but I just happened to notice it when I reset my tasks to record me completing them
  • Hopefully my self-discipline will prevent me from abusing the game by selling these items in the market for coins!!!
• To spice things up, I formed a party with my friend who introduced me to Habitica. After seeing his rather reasonable tasks, I began thinking about what kind of real-life rewards I could purchase with my own gold
  • Only problem is, I don’t want them to let me avoid certain tasks since that would go against my reason for using the app, and I don’t want it to be monetary based since I’ll end up going broke. I’ll get back to it some other time.
• I thought the application was rather simple, until I read one of the wiki pages and realized how much there is to learn.
  • For example, although checklists don’t give any rewards upon completion, they mitigate the damage of an unfinished daily
• After a rather productive day with virtually all dailies done and some habits included, I managed to get a whopping 16.31 coins
• Wanting some more loot, my friend and I embarked on a quest to fight the feral dust bunnies!!!
  • I have no idea how this will work, but I guess we’ll have to learn as we go
• I said I wouldn’t enjoy the gamification aspect, but I like it
  • It’s wholesome, it adds a new incentive for doing things, and I like being able to talk to my friend about the different features and items
• Unfortunately, it’s like 30 minutes until my bedtime and I haven’t done my daily skillshare learning so I’m interested in seeing what punishment I’ll get
• Tomorrow, I’ll spend some time learning about some potential features that can improve my workflow and enjoyment using the app

Day 2 - Informative

• It’s near the end of the day, and so far the boss has a hefty amount of hp left on it
  • The rewards don’t seem too appealing, but I guess it acts as a cooperative and long-term incentive to stay consistent
• Today, I spent some time refining my habits, and added some new ones
  • I really enjoy how you can set up both good and bad habits, and how you can see your progress throughout the day or week
  • Additionally, I also spent some time readjusting levels of difficulty
    • Although meant for declaring the difficulty of the task, you can also base it on the desired weight of the consequence when missing or achieving it
      • In my case, I set something as simple as not touching my face to hard so I really prioritize not doing it
• I’ve been struggling to come up with tasks to incorporate into the app, but thankfully habitica has a bunch of sample ones on their wiki
  • If you’re a nerd like me and want to learn all the specific uses and explore the reinforcement mechanism the game provides, I left the link to it in the description of the video for further reading. While we’re at it, might as well mention some more neat things I learned
    • Todos don’t actually hurt you if you don’t complete them in time, and the older a todo is, the more rewards it will give you if you complete it cap at 1 month
      • I was worried about not being able to finish all my todos this week, but it’s nice to see that I won’t instantly die the day they’re all due :)
    • Dailies
      • You earn more rewards as a streak develops, but at the same time, you also lose rewards since you’re becoming used to the activity
        • In fact, if you build a good streak and happen to forget a day, you won’t take as much damage
      • If something is done later in the night, you have a chance to check dailies off the day after
  • Now that I think about it, I’m surprised at how intricate and distinct the three task lists are.
• Likewise, there’s also quite some depth in the rewards section, since you have to consider things like the amount of coins you get in a day and how you’re going to balance spending coins on real-life rewards and in-game items
  • Personally, I was finally able to set up some rewards for some leisure activities I can do during the break. I currently get around 16 coins a day, so claiming an anime break period would cost me a quarter of a day’s productivity
  • The wiki also has some more questions to help you set up your rewards workflow, so I’ll put them up on the screen right now
• That wraps it up for day 2. Onto day 3

Day 3 - Deeper / Gamification

• There’s a beginner challenge where if you do these 5 things, you can get 100 coins
  • It’s been there since the beginning, so I decided to finally do it
• I don’t know how I feel about my current pet, so I decided to create some more
  • I just realized that the potions you give the pet affect the kind of pet it is
  • I settled for a cotton candy blue dragon, which looks kinda cute :o
• Anyways, to make the use of my coins I decided to look at the ingame items I could buy, as I didn’t think I was deserving of converting it into real-life rewards
  • I learned that different equipment provide different statuses, here’s a chart showcasing some of the specifics
    • The four stats in-game are strength, constituion, intelligence, and perception
    • Each one has a primary class and secondary class that it is attributed to, and levelling up these stats provide in-game benefits
      • For example, you could level up your constitution to reduce the damage you take when missing dailies or indulging in bad habits
        • Although it does make your character more connected to your personal life, I don’t want to use the stat as encouragement to be more lazy with my tasks
        • Additionally, classes that specialize in a certain skill gain extra status points from equipment
          • Seeing that I want a heavier focus on in-game benefits rather than personal ones, I’m leaning a bit towards the mage for more xp, drops, and gold
            • Unfortunately, classes unlock at level 10, so I don’t even know if I’ll be able to hit that by the end of this week
• I went trigger happy with my spending, and just realized that I messed up
  • My already-existing armor gave me perception, but I mindlessly bought two constitution versions, which is exactly what I didn’t want
  • On top of that, my current hat gave me intelligence, so I’m not sure if I want to switch that out
  • I should’ve just maxed out my sword and called it a day

Day 4

• Hit level 6 :o
• I haven’t been able to put much effort into clearing my todos, and right now I’m sitting at a mountain of tasks
  • I would prefer if you were to be punished for not completing a todo on the set deadline, since right now, the dates are only acting as a decoration
  • I need to either make it urgent, or start cutting off things that aren’t important or that I don’t need to do
    • Thus, I decided to create a daily to ensure that I made some progress on my todo list throughout the day
      • I already have the habit, but this will provide some more urgency
• I didn’t think I’d actually use these for a while, but I ended up playing a round of Gunfire Reborn with a friend so I paid the price of 4 coins
• The bunnies have a sliver of health left; if I complete a few more tasks, I’ll wake up to some sweet rewards
• I don’t really know what else to include in this day, so I decided to explore the guilds section. There are various guilds you can choose from, with some even having over 30,000 members! However, as soon as I entered, I realized it wasn’t for me; although it would definitely help you meet new habitica users with similar interests, guilds only consist of a chatboard that only displays 200 messages, and a sidebar description. Nonetheless, I still joined some just to see if they would be of any use. I’d much rather prefer sticking to browsing reddit though.

Days 5-7

I’m gonna be straight up, there’s just not that much new things for me to talk about or explore. Before I go over these last 3 days, feel free to skip to the workflow part of the video.

Day 5

• I had school and a bunch of events I had to go to, so I couldn’t do much habitica deep diving
• For todays progress, I hit level 7, beat the bunnies, and started a new quest
  • Instead of fighting a boss, we just have to find things by doing tasks
• By the end of the day, I managed to overpass my friend

Day 6

• By having sorting the todo daily to be in the front, I’m more conscious of finding time in my day to work on them
  • Only problem is, most of my breaks consist of either exercising or maintenance activities like eating and sleeping, so I can’t really cram much into there
• I’ve been accumulating a lot of coins, so I decided to say YOLO and bought the 100 coin mystery chest
  • This was actually a pretty lucky pull considering that I want to be a mage :o Maybe hitting level 10 on the last day will be possible with these new stat buffs!
• I created a ha
• To further punish myself for not sticking to my to do’s, I created a bad habit I would tick off if I were to miss a to do or sloppily do it
• Tomorrow I’ll refine my workflow and go through how Habitica fits into my daily life

Day 7

• Unfortunately, as of writing this, it’s the end of the day and I wasn’t able to hit level 10. If you’re interested in using habitica, I guess that’s just one thing you’ll have to learn on your own ;)
• Now that the 7 days are over, I think it’s time to go over my workflow and use for the app

How I Incorporate Habitica into my Workflow

• To truly show you how I incorporate Habitica into my workflow, you’ll have to understand the other practices and applications I have to use, so bear with me :D
• Habitica acts as an all-in-one action list that helps remind and organize my day. The entire process begins at Sunday, when I fill out my weekly review in Obsidian. If you’re looking for a new note-taking app, I would recommend checking out my video on it. After setting some goals for the week, I converted my various goals into actionable steps categorized by Habitica’s habits, dailies, and to do’s. Every morning, I use the Dailies I set up in Habitica to create my daily plan, and use the To Do’s to fill up any extra break or work periods. If I have some extra time after finishing a task early, I have the tag DuringSpare to see what tasks can be gradually completed throughout small work periods. When switching between work and break sessions, I’ll update Habitica, tracking my habits and checking off any to do’s or dailies. At the end of the week, I’ll re-evaluate my task difficulties, clean up any dusty tasks, and prepare for my next weekly review.

Reflection

Benefits

• Aside from the in-game benefits, Habitica’s aspects of gamification help me be more mindful of the impact my actions have on improving my life. For example, whenever I receive my gold and experience rewards, I’m prompted to also think about the real-life rewards that accompany completing a task, which helps me find solace amidst the everyday grind. Furthermore, as my character levels up, I can’t help but visualize my own long-term growth achieved from actually getting things done
  • I didn’t go too much into it, but if you’re creative enough, I would consider creating a story for your character to make the process more immersive. One implementation that caught my eye was how this reddit user sets creative names and features for their habits. I’ll leave a link to the reddit post in the description.
• Different measurements like your loss in HP and the tallies on habits provide some insight on what went wrong throughout a day or week. It may not be too detailed, but it gives a rough idea on some possible areas of focus or improvements.

Downsides

• I don’t have any major complaints with Habitica, but there’s some features that I wouldn’t mind having
• I get there’s other applications that can easily fill this purpose, but I wish the guilds were further developed with features like different text channels and permanent messages
• It would be cool if the bosses gave more rewards, as I can earn this amount of gold and experience from completing 5 tasks
• I wish there was an option to add custom lists based off tags or other criteria. Searching through tags is sufficient enough, but with the absolute length of my lists, I wouldn’t mind having a few more :~

Recommendation

• As of now, Habitica’s mix of simple functionality and gamification elements make the program stand out from it’s competitors. As long as I continually find ways to keep myself engaged, I’m sure it’ll continue to be a staple in my daily workflow.
• Organizing my tasks into Habitica’s classifications of to do’s, dailies, and habits has turned out to be an effective antidote for the lack of clarity I experience throughout the day, as it helps remind me of what I should or could be doing.
• I used to use todoist, but slowly stopped using it as I began using Obsidian to schedule my day and keep track of my todo’s. I’m not sure if it’s the gamification or the honeymoon phase, but using Habitica just makes my day seamless and productive.

Conclusion

Anyways, that’s all I have to share for my one week habitica experience. Thanks for watching until the very end! I initially did not expect much when trying Habitica out, but spending a week to try it out and actually incorporate it in my life has been rewarding. Now, it’s your turn to gamify and level up your own life. If you found my advice helpful be sure to like and share this video, and subscribe for more content like this. Stay mindful.

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Created:: 2021-06-13 23:02