Habitica (formerly HabitRPG) turns building good habits into a game. It’s simple to use, but it can be a little daunting to set up for the first time. Let me show you how I use it.
Create Your Account
If you haven’t already, create your Habitica account. I recommend doing all of the setup on the website, and then log in with the app later. It’s much easier to get started with the web version.
- Go to https://habitica.com and create an account. I recommend using the Facebook or Google login to keep it simple.
- Once your account is made, you’ll be walked through the steps to create your character.
- Pick out your skin color, hair, and all that great stuff. You can always change these options later.
- Once your account is created, Habitica will try to fill out some tasks that it thinks matches your profile.
- You can use these tasks if you want, but to really get the most out of Habitica, you’d create your own. Fortunately, you can delete any tasks by clicking on them and selecting Delete at the bottom. We’ll get to creating your tasks shortly.
How Habitica Works
In Habitica, you break your habits/tasks down into three sections.
HABITS – Habits are things you want to do (or avoid) on a regular basis. They aren’t necessarily things you want to do everyday, but instead things you want to reward (or punish) yourself for doing. For example, if you want to drink more water, you’ll create a habit called Drink Water. This habit will only have a positive option, since you are only going to reward yourself for drinking water. If your habit was instead something you were trying to avoid, like drinking soda, then you’d make that a negative habit.
The Difficulty of a habit determines how much of a reward you’ll get. Be honest here. If a action is difficult, give it a higher difficulty. If it is something relatively easy, be sure to set it up properly. Trivial tasks gain hardly any reward. If the task is Negative, the difficulty will determine how much you are punished for doing it, with higher difficulties punishing harder.
DAILIES – Dailies are the things you set out to do every day. Habitica lets you schedule your Dailies. For example, if one of your Dailies is to pack your lunch for work, you can turn off that Daily on days you don’t go to work. The other difference between Dailies and Habits are that unfinished Dailies will punish you at the end of the day. This means if you skip them, you’ll start to lose the game. Building Dailies can help build routines that keep you productive and on track.
TO-DOS – To-Dos are one-off tasks. They might be quick things you need to do once, or major milestones. The longer a To-Do sits, the better the reward is. This gives you incentive to put in longer term, more difficult tasks, and to get older tasks done first.
Habitica rewards you by giving your gold and XP (Experience points) represented by the yellow bar. When the yellow bar fills up, you gain a level. Gaining a level refills your health. If you miss Dailies or do Negative Habits, you’ll lose health. If you lose all of your health, you’ll go down a level and lose the gold.
REWARDS – Habitica offers rewards in the form of weapons, outfits, and armor. These can make it easier to survive bad days and help you get even more rewards each day. You can also create your own rewards. For example, if you want to give yourself a cheat day, you can create one as a reward for 100 gold.
What My Habitica Looks Like
I like to give myself a lot of opportunities to check things off. The more dailies and habits you give yourself, the more rewards and the more dopamine gets pumped through your brain.
There’s a lot more to Habitica as you play it. You’ll collect eggs, which turn into pets, and food to feed your pets. You can go on quests with others, and most importantly, join a party for accountability.
I’m running a party, the Quixotic Fellowship. If you want to join, say so in the comments or hit me up directly!
