How I’m suddenly getting more done – Initial thoughts on Habiti…

Before I begin, I must emphasize that this is my first impression of the app. Although the difference Habitica has made has been that of night and day, I will still be giving you only my first impressions of the app and talk only about the features I have used up till now. As of writing this post, it has been only ten days since I started using Habitica, so there is no denying that I still am to explore and experiment with all the features and scenarios, of which there are many. So instead of one long review, I will share my experience along the way. Today, I will tell you how much of a difference it has made in only ten days.

What Habitica does is essentially construct a very simple yet quite effective rewarding system for real-world tasks that you set up for yourself. You can look at it like this, you do real-life quests in which you are rewarded with in-game rewards. For chronic procrastinators, such as myself, a reward system for real-world tasks might seem like THE antidote. Habitica divides tasks into three different categories: habits, dailies, and to-dos; more on these later. Then there’s the avatar, which is like your little character/warrior. With each task completed on time, you get experience points, get enough experience points and you level up which is rewarded with gold coins, which you also get when you complete a task on time. Now, the gold coins come in handy when you want to either purchase armor or weapons from the shop, or even buy custom real-world rewards that you can set up along with how many gold coins they cost. The armor and weapons come in handy when your character goes on quests, which I will talk about in detail in another article. That is the idea of the app in the most basic way, there are several more details and features in each of the things I have described but I won’t be talking about them today.

You set a daily task if it’s something that you’re supposed to do daily, say, waking up on time. You set a habit task if you want to get into the habit of doing something, I, for example, have set up a habit task of “Clean up phone gallery”. You set a to-do task if it’s a one-time thing, such as sending an email.

As I mentioned, it has been only ten days since I started using Habitica, however, the difference in the amount of work that I have been able to get done is astounding, to say the least. Almost all my tasks are daily tasks, things that I am supposed to work on every single day and Habitica has proven to be extremely helpful for me. Granted, for Habitica to work as intended, you need to be honest with yourself, if you did not get a task done, do not mark it as done; it ONLY works if you use it correctly and honestly.

Though I am aware that it is too early to conclude the effectiveness of Habitica over a longer period, but with the difference it has made for me in just the last ten days, it only seemed fair that I share my initial thoughts about it with you as soon as possible.

If you love gaming or love the idea of gamifying your task management, I HIGHLY recommend Habitica. The Habitica app is free, you can download it for both Android and iOS or even play on Mac or Windows PC by visiting Habitica.com.