This week’s issue is about the thing that made the most impact on my productivity in the last year.
Few months ago I had one of these days where I was in a mood to give chances to todo apps I haven’t tried yet (the list was shrinking). In the past I’ve heard of HabitRPG, the old name of Habitica, which was promoted as gamification todo app (still is) which definitely wasn’t my thing, but I’m so grateful that this time I tried to look pass that and researched further.
I went to watch videos of the platform, and the first thing that grabbed me was the board interface which I’m a fan of, then I think the different kind of tasks that you can have in “one place” sealed the deal, mostly because you can make it work for you, without spending much time and making it feel like a part-time job. In fact the first few videos I watched about it, were made by people who mainly explained their board setup, not the platform features.
Tasks board
The board is separated into three columns - habits, dailies and to-dos which I think is great and provides you with variety of options for creating a workflow (I want to keep these short, so I won’t be going over mine this time)
The RPG(gamification) part
Very over the top summary about the the RPG layer on top of Habitica. Basically you have a character which gains experience, gold and items on completing tasks, which can be exchanged for nice looking sets or pets/mounts. Doing a negative habit or failing to complete daily will make you lose health points and if that continues you can lose levels. This alone will rarely turn a serial procrastinator into a productivity master, but it’s a great addition on top of a good task system, especially if you are fan of RPGs.
There are others!
I can say that the non-flashy design of this service and the absence of hype around it made me think that it was abandoned, but this turned out to be very wrong. Maybe the flagship feature of Habitica is the community, which is grouped in guilds based on professions, hobbies, life and productivity goals or interests, so it’s very easy to find your community and start to feel at home.
Checking the communities is the first step into forming a party, which main purpose is to complete quests for cool rewards, by fighting monsters who receive damage when someone completes tasks, but can also increase the penalty of not completing dailies, which is where different character classes play important role, but are out of the scope here.
Most importantly, parties are very useful if you need accountability partner.
Open Source
This can be a huge drive for some - the whole group of apps is open source and there are perks for helping.