Gamify Life with Habitica

On a Saturday morning, I laid down on my sofa, paralyzed. Nothing physically wrong, though. Just my anxiety piling up. I have so many things I want to do, and the thought of not having enough time to make progress on anything made me stuck. Not doing anything. A paradox, I know.

Over the years, I’ve been interested in quite a few things, here are some of them:

• Create a video game
• Write a book
• Learn to draw
• Read a ton of my unread books (and e-books!)
• Re-learn math (I suck at calculus)
• Learn to play piano
• Start playing games from my gigantic Steam (and Humble! and Epic!) library (just start any, dangit. The sheer number gave me decision paralysis)
• Post more to my site (yeah I know, didn’t happen much either)
• Learn Blender
• Tinker with electronics
• Grow succulents

And those are things OUTSIDE my work, which, as a software engineer, there are myriads of things I should learn, both to broaden my knowledge and gain mastery on select few subjects.

And so, I turned to the only light of hope in times of darkness. I opened ChatGPT on my phone. (what? were you expecting something else?)

It told me to calm down (still nice to hear something like this, you know, even if it’s coming from the future overlord), and list out habit and interest tracking apps.

Intrigued, I cross-checked the app recommendation with Perplexity, and some apps came up in both lists. One of them resonates with my nerdy side: Habitica, an RPG-themed (complete with pixel art!) habit and to-do list tracker.

They do have subscription and free tiers, and I’m happy to report that the free tier is more than enough for me. But I am considering subscribing in the future to support the Habitica team.

The to-do list is what you expect. The habit tracker support both reinforcing positive habits and rewarding for not doing negative ones. When there are tasks that you really want to push yourself to do, there’s Daily list, where failure causes you to lose health (when you are in an active quest).

I recently figured out their challenges system, and it is pretty neat that the team and community premade some (often themed) tasks for you that will give you extra rewards.

How does it work for me? Well, apart from the satisfaction of damaging a quest boss by doing my chores, offloading the things I want to do to the app takes the weight off my back. Rather than worrying about which task to do, I can just pick one and tick it off afterwards.

Oh, and the cosmetics I get from ticking off my to-do list are great.

Not too shabby, eh?

One thing that I still haven’t got a chance to experience is partying, where friends can do a quest together and got punished together if a party member missed a daily. Poke me if you are interested!