Familiar Diversions

This is not a book-related post, but I suppose it could be a reviewing-related post. Sort of.

For the past three weeks, I've been using something called HabitRPG to keep track of my To Do lists, to make myself do things I normally avoid, and to encourage myself to adopt better habits. I've barely scratched the surface on what I can do with the site (which also has an app - great for when I want to log what I've accomplished but don't want to turn on my computer). However, I'm enjoying it enough that I might actually break down and get a subscription.

Basically, HabitRPG is a productivity and habit-improving tool that's designed to be like an RPG. Completing tasks (such as doing the dishes, making a dentist appointment, or whatever else you want) earns you experience points and gold. You can spend the gold on whatever rewards you choose. For example, for 10 gold, I allow myself to go book shopping at one location (Smashwords, brick-and-mortar store, etc.). I originally had it set up so that 10 gold allowed me to buy one book, but, well, that just made me really sad.

There are three types of things that can earn you gold and experience points: Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos. Habits might be things you want to encourage yourself to do, like being on time to events or working more productively, or things you’d like to stop doing, like biting your nails. Negative habits don’t touch your gold or experience – instead, they affect your HP (hit points). If you lose all 50 HP, you die. I haven’t died yet, but from what I’ve read, dying means you start over at Level 1, with 0 gold and 0 experience.

Dailies are stuff you want to do every day, and missing one will hurt your HP. At the moment, since I want to get through my review backlog, one of my dailies is to work on reviews for at least 45 minutes. You can also set Dailies to only go into effect on certain days of the week – for example, maybe you want to set “Do laundry” for Saturdays.

To-Dos are things you do on more of an occasional basis. You can set due dates, although I haven’t yet seen much of a purpose for that. Once I’m all caught up on my vacation reading reviews, I’ll probably remove reviewing from my Dailies and rely entirely on To-Dos to keep track of what I need to review.

There’s a bit of extra complexity in the To-Dos, Habits, and Dailies, such as varying rewards and damage depending on how often you do something, the difficulty level you set, tagging, checklists, etc. Also, you can buy items for your avatar that can help you out – for example, armor to reduce the amount of damage caused by missing a Daily, or a potion to restore some of your HP.

The more RPG-like aspects come in at around Level 4, when completing tasks occasionally allows you to find eggs, potions, and food items. The potions can be used to hatch the eggs, which become pets that you can feed so they’ll eventually grow into mounts. I don’t currently have a mount, but I do have pets, such as the adorable turkey you can see in my picture.

The truly RPG-like stuff involves either being more social or spending a little bit of real money. You can join challenges people have started, start your own challenges, or form a party (a party of one is perfectly fine) and go on a quest. I haven’t done any of this yet, but it sounds like fun.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. I’ve been enjoying the site a lot so far. It still hasn’t helped me clean my bathroom (I think I’m going to need to break that down into smaller To-Dos, so it’s not so daunting), but it’s gotten me to balance my checkbook on a regular basis, exercise every day, and get a bit more sleep, so I’m happy with it.