I’ve recently shared my new obsession with a habit-forming app called Habitica. Habitica changes your life into a role-playing game—as you get tasks done in real life, your character advances on the platform. It’s a great deal of fun, and I can’t get enough of it. While some people certainly just use Habitica for the task-listing function, some folks get right into the role-playing side of things, which makes using the website even more fun.
A great thing about Habitica are the guilds—groups of people who gather around a similar interest, in message boards that mimic my 90s experiences. Except that instead of random strangers talking about whatever (and sometimes not being very nice to each other, apparently), random strangers talk about improving their life, getting organized, and work on their self-development in their areas of interest.
Another awesome thing about Habitica are the challenges that individual players and guild leaders make. When you participate in challenges, you’re part of a group working towards a common goal, and you can discuss your successes and obstacles in the guilds.
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A guild I recently found that I have totally fallen in love with is Fantasy Adventurers. In this group, there are fantasy challenges that take role-playing to the next level, getting you to spend a year learning at Hogwarts, making you fight monsters in an enchanted forest, getting you to run to catch tricky zzz’s, farming and harvesting tomatoes as you complete tasks using the pomodoro technique, and more.
I’m participating in several challenges in this guild, but the one I’ve really gotten into is the Enchanted Forest one. It’s awesome for so many reasons. First, it makes mundane tasks like washing dishes seem magical—and I really do need encouragement to collect those magic bubbles… It has a bit of strategy behind it as you figure out whether to buy the equipment needed to fight bosses or to save your gold and charms to get through obstacles first. And there’s some math involved, too.
All this stuff makes day-to-day tasks a little less annoying, and gets me motivated to get stuff done. You can certainly keep track of all your scores for this game on the platform itself, but I’m a bit more of a paper and pen kind of gal, so I like to keep track of my scores on a sheet of paper and then enter my numbers at the end of the day. To that end, I created a tally sheet which I’ve laminated. I keep track of the charms I collect throughout the day, enter my numbers in the evening, erase the tally sheet, and start over the next day.
If you’ve come to this post from Habitica and you think the tally sheet might help you, please feel free to download it here. Enjoy!
Role-playing games themselves have been teaching strategy, math, statistics and social skills since Gary Gygax started Dungeons and Dragons and before that. This kind of gamification has immense potential to make any kind of learning into something fun, and that includes learning to form healthy habits!
This is a fantastic example of taking the whimsy and rewards of games with the real-world benefits of healthy actions and habits. I’m excited to try it out!
Thanks for your comment, Dylanna!
I’m completely obsessed with Habitica; I absolutely love it for all of the habits it’s helping me form, but also for the amazing, supportive community. I look forward to seeing you in the guilds 🙂