Turn your life into an RPG with Habitica

Complete everyday tasks to gain gold, items, experience, and level up in life

By Carlos Bilan, Staff Writer

Do you find it hard to motivate yourself to finish tasks? Are you one of those people who makes to-do lists and then ends up not doing them, or leaving their tasks until the last minute? Well there is a really cool app that can help you out. It’s a free productivity app called Habitica.

So how exactly does the app help you? It gamifies your life by rewarding you for completing tasks and punishing you for not completing them. In the gaming world, you’ll be gaining experience and gold for crossing out tasks from your college or everyday planner and you’ll lose health if you, say, forget to buy groceries on the day you were supposed to. In other words, all of your tasks become quests, and you have to complete them if you want to level up in the game and in life.

Habitica allows you to break down tasks into three main categories. “Habits” is the first category. For example, if you want to get into the habit of drinking eight glasses of water a day, you can add that particular habit. When you have done that each day, you click the plus sign so you get rewarded gold and experience. On the contrary, if you have not done it, then you click the minus sign and you lose health.

The second category is “Dailies.” You add tasks in here that you have to complete every day, or repeatedly on a certain number of days. That is to say, you can put down tasks you want to integrate into your daily or weekly routine. By default, tasks you add into the daily become everyday tasks, so if you need to walk the dog every day, you can add that task. The twist about dailies is that you lose health if you have not cleared them each day. Although, you can also set the days when this task activates. For example, you want to make it a weekly routine to go to the gym on certain days, you can add that task onto dailies and set the days when it appears.

The final main category is called “To-Dos.” If you have homework to be completed that day, or need to finish a chapter of reading, you can put them down and check them off when you have finished them. If you use a third party app like Wunderlist to complete To-Dos, then you can sync Habitica with it so you get rewarded.

Essentially, you can set the difficulty of each task. The more difficult the task, the more gold and experience will be rewarded. For dailies, you also get additional silver when you achieve a streak number of completing tasks daily. Besides the features already mentioned, Habitica has more in store to make your experience more interactive. You get an avatar that is customizable. When you reach level 10, you get to choose which class type you want to be: Warrior, Mage, Healer, or Rogue. You can also buy equipment and have a pet, including wolves, dragons, bears, and other mythical beasts.

You can also play in the world of Habitica by completing quests, joining guilds, fighting dragons, etc. Of course, this is an optional feature, but if you are a gamer at heart then this is worth checking out. I can also say that from experience, this app has really increased my productivity and made completing tasks more rewarding. I haven’t stopped using it since I downloaded it.