Table of Contents
- What is Habitica?
- Why Should I use Habitica?
- What are Habitica’s features?
- Habits
- Dailies
- To-dos
- Rewards / Items
- Classes
- Pets
- Guilds
- Party
- Is Habitica free?
- What can Habitica help me with?
- Starting out template you can use
- Conclusion
What is Habitica?
Habitica is an advanced habit tracker that helps you improve your habits and can be used as an organization planner. The habit tracking is disguised as an RPG (role-playing game) with it’s items, health, experience, guilds and quests. It’s open sourced and available on your browser and on iOS and Android devices. The strength of this platform lies in the 3 habit categories available: habits, dailies and to-dos. The platform is reinforced further by the RPG aspect which helps motivate the user.
Since using Habitica my time management and organization skills have greatly improved, I now use Habitica as the driving platform to connect my productivity apps and calendar. I will share in this guide the different functionalities the app has to offer and how to use them to turn Habitica into a centralized organization platform.
Why should I use Habitica?
Habitica’s main use is to help your habit consistency. Habits can then be used in different ways to increase and decrease behaviors or organize your day.
You might ask, why Habitica over others? From a technical perspective, Habitica has 3 different ways of tracking habits combined on one platform, meaning more possibilities for the way they can be used. Habitica is also an RPG, a gamified way of rewarding yourself for doing habits. It’s been improved by the user community since 2013, and has an aesthetic UI. If you don’t think Habitica is for you, you could check out apps like Todoist, Loop Habit Tracker or systems like bullet journals.
What are Habitica’s features?
Habits
In Habitica, habits refers to habits for which you can positively and negatively reward. A positive reward gives you gold, experience and maybe an item whereas a negative reward takes away health. This can be used for quitting smoking for example: every day you don’t smoke you press +, every time you smoke you press – . I personally don’t use the negative rewards, I use this section to track habits like finishing a chapter, growing a tree on Forest and completing a longer meditation. You can choose a difficulty level of the habit (diff. multiplier) and choose if the habit is a + , – , or both.
Dailies
In Habitica, Dailies are habits that you check once and they’re done but reset the next day. Dailies can be customized in difficulty and track your streak but it’s best features are the scheduling and checklists. With scheduling you can make a habit active during only on mondays and tuesdays, appear every month while the checklist means a habit can have multiple components. When I started adding many habits, I grouped some together in checklists under “routines.”
To-dos
In Habitica, To-dos refer to tasks that are created for one use: when you complete it it dissapears. To-dos shares the difficulty and tag features Habits and Dailies has and Dailies’s checklist feature. To-dos can also be scheduled for a certain day/time. If left unattended they turn orange, then red.
I’ve found To-dos are used two very different ways. The first is To-dos can be projects such as finishing a blog post or planning a wedding with the checklist. I personally prefer turning my projects into Dailies where I work on them a little every other day for example. The way I use To-dos is for short term scheduling. At the start of the day I transcript every task I have to do that day to the To-dos list and I have to empty the list by the end of the day. This way when I have time I can open the app and see what I could do rather than leaving it to my wandering mind.
Rewards / Items
In Habitica, when you complete a Habit, Daily or To-do you have a chance of receiving an item. With the gold you also receive, you can purchase items in “Rewards” or in the shop where you can choose rather than leave it to chance. You can buy equipment (robe, hat, weapons), food, eggs and potions. I’ll talk about these more under Pets.
Classes
There are four classes in Habitica: warrior, rogue, healer and mage. You unlock classes at level 5 and can choose one which lets you purchase equipment for that class.
The advantages for the first class, warrior, are mainly dealing higher damage to bosses during quests and having a higher change of getting critical hits however have lower experience (XP) gain. They’re useful in boss battles and if you’re want more items.
Rogue has the benefit of finding the most drops and gold and higher odds of critical hits. Its weakness is it deals lower damage to bosses. This class is useful in collection quests and for players who want to upgrade equipment and level quickly.
Healer has the highest defense against damage, can heal themselves and make tasks less damaging when not done. Same as Rogue, their weakness is dealing lower damage to bosses. Healer is useful in parties and if you have many Dailies and/or negative Habits.
Mage receives experience the quickest, gains mana the quickest and deals additional dammage to bosses. Its weakness is it has the lowest Constitution skillpoint level. It’s useful in boss battles and if you want to level up quickly.
Pets
In classic RPG fashion, Habitica has a pet feature. There are eggs for various creatures (tigers, flying pigs, cactus’s) and potions that change the appearance of the pets. Once you combine an egg and a potion, you get a pet. Once you fully feed the pet with food (found in drops) it turns into a mount. Both pets and mounts can be used on your avatar but bring no benefits other than to show off.
Guilds
Guilds are forums (social groups) that group together people of similar interests (scholars, life hackers, artists) where you can chat with others in a group chat or make a post. Guilds can also offer challenges that are added as tasks.
There are two types of guilds: public and private. To join a public guild you can go on the guild page and browse the top 30 guilds or make a personalized search then press Join. To join a private guild you need to be invited with your user ID.
Guilds have many social functionalities such as making your own, guild banks, solo guilds which you can find more about here.
Party
In traditional RPG fashion, Habitica offers parties where members can be in a group, chat, follow each others progress and keep each other accountable. On the contrary to guilds, you can only be in one party at a time. You need to be invited to a party to join one. Parties are designed to be an accountability community and also have a quest feature. Quests are story based missions where members fight a boss or collect items which can be started with a quest scroll. Find out more about parties here.
Is Habitica free?
Habitica is free but contains in-app purchases under the form of a subscription. Habitica is NOT pay-to-win, the subscription and items you can buy are just for aesthetics. A subscription costs 5$ a month and paying for a few months in advance gives you discounts. A subscription allows you to buy gems with gold, double the daily drop-cap, get monthly mystery items and help the developers.
What can Habitica help me with?
Since habits and completing tasks is beneficial to everyone, Habitica can help all sorts of users. From work, chores, school to exercise, creativity, health & wellness and self-care, Habitica can help you.
Habitica can help you improve your self-care by setting yourself Dailies to brush your teeth, meditate or using Habits with positive and negative reinforcement to reduce smoking. Habitica can help you complete chores either with Dailies for taking the garbage out for example by scheduling your Daily to appear every Tuesday or in your daily To-dos list. You can use To-dos as a list of projects to help keep track of the work you need to do, or add a Daily where you work 20 minutes a day on a particular project (I use this to study for my driving license, I’ve got a daily to do a practice test every day). You can use Habitica to exercise, either by reminding you with a scheduled Daily or setting up multiple Habits with particular workouts, giving yourself a reward when you complete a benchpress set (more about that here).
As you can see, what makes Habitica so powerful is that it provides you with tools that can be used many ways and can be used as a structure for many parts of your life. The more creative you are, the better Habitica will be for you.
Starting out template you can use
Maybe you’re interested in getting started on Habitica but aren’t sure what to start with. The best way to start is starting small with some basic tasks and habits that you already do as the key to Habitica working is you need to first develop the habit of opening Habitica every day. To do this, try to add Dailies that are habits you already do every day (brush your teeth, eat), or follow the template below:
If you already know what you would like to use Habitica for, Habitica will help you when creating your account and generate tasks for you. You can also directly implement Habits/Dailies/To-dos that you want or that you’ve seen in this guide to maximize your productivity.
Conclusion
Habitica is a powerful software application that can be used in many creative ways to help you keep track of tasks and habits while encouraging you to complete them and improve yourself at the same time. If you need help staying on top of tasks, have a desire to improve your habits and lifestyle, need motivation to complete projects or you’re looking for a fun/aesthetic way of staying organized, then Habitica is for you. Just remember that to let Habitica help your productivity, the first habit you need to setup is opening the app every day! You can do this by putting Habitica on your phone home screen and setting notifications.
I hope this guide was helpful and helped you understand what Habitica is, why it’s useful and how to use it. If you have any questions or something to add, leave a comment down below or ask me on social media:
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