HABITRPG : Reaching Productivity the RPG Way

Meet little mage Veruchka and her pink cotton candy wolf!
Veruchka is my character on habitrpg :) 

Hi, people, I haven’t died yet (surprise, surprise!).

I know I’ve been on hiatus for a rather long period. These last few months I’ve been quite busy, and Indonesian internet was being…well, the usual Indonesian internet, so I was not able to post a lot, aside from my short comments/rant on twitter and goodreads. I admit laziness also played some part, but no worries, now I already found a way to banish the laziness and I ‘m going to share it with you! See how nice I can be? ;)

I admit that I am not naturally organized. I forgot things. I procrastinate. I don’t do things in the most effective and efficient way. I wrote things on notes so I would not forget, only to find myself completely forget about the notes later. Being organized and productive has been always an obsession for me. Some kind of elusive dream, something I always strive to be, but I was never quite there.

Knowing that the traditional ways of hard copy notes and agenda won’t help me much, I’ve tried a lot of organizer and to-do apps. The first few weeks, I was highly motivated, but then I felt bored and I was back to square one. This one was not fun enough, that one has good features but I need to pay much for that…blah blah blah. And then, someday at the end of December, I randomly searched “gamify your life” on Google and I found Habitrpg. I’ve been trying the site and mobile app for more or less one month now, and I can positively say that Habitrpg suited my main needs : fun, allow sub-checklists, and regularly remind me of the consequence of my tardiness. I use it complementarily with Todoist for time sensitive tasks related to work, because I can synchronized both apps and…well, Todoist looks more professional when I have to open my to-do list in front of my boss hahaha (I also love their karma points feature). But for other tasks, I switched almost completely to Habitrpg.

Why do I love Habitrpg so much? These are my favourite features of Habitrpg:

1. The fun concept

The concept of Habitrpg is simple and fun.  I copy-pasted the following explanation from their feature page :

It "gamifies" your life by turning all your tasks (habits, dailies, and to-dos) into little monsters you have to conquer. The better you are at this, the more you progress in the game. If you slip up in life, your character starts backsliding in the game.

When you missed your daily tasks, your character’s health point will be decreasing, and when you finished your dailies, to-do lists, and encourage good habits, you can see yourself literally leveling up. You also got golds which you can use to purchase in game items for your characters (e.g. robes, weapons, defensive shields) as well as real-life rewards you determine for yourself (e.g. for me, I can only buy one book when I have collected 30 coins in Habitrpg). It’s perfect to practice your ability to delay gratification and control your craving. Sometimes you also got random drops such as in-game pet eggs and pet food, which, albeit confers no direct benefit, looks so cute alongside your character (see Veruchka’s pink cotton candy wolf up there?)

I also loved how they have thought thoroughly about the reward mechanism. You can set the difficulties of the task by yourself, so reward for submitting an article to international journal will be different than the reward for cleaning the dishes. Seems fairer this way, don’t you think?

2. The “Quest” feature

The road to productivity doesn’t have to be one long, serious, and solitary journey. Invite your friends and play together! You can even work together in a quest where you finished tasks to deal damage to the boss or to collect random drops. It plays on your accountability, if you don’t finish your dailies, your quest party also suffer the consequences.

My friend Anin finally relented to my almost non-stop Habitrpg promotion, and made an account. We are on our first quest now to defeat The Basi-List (I also love their creative names for monsters! Hahaha). She seems to enjoy it so far, although sometimes I slipped up and missed my dailies, haha. See if I can “convert” my other friends to be a Habiticans too in the future…haha.

My current task window on Habitrpg. The blue-shirt warrior is my quest buddy Anin :)
There are still a lot of space left for other person I will convert to be Habitican in the future :)

3. The responsive staff and supportive environments

Habitrpg has almost all kind of guilds and parties (communities) imaginable. From people who loves Harry Potter to people who are stressed out by school assignments…you will find at least one which suit your needs! We can also create challenges in the guilds, and put gems (attainable by donating for development of habitrpg) as a prize to spice up the challenges. Personally, I found some Habiticans who also participated in Coursera online course I am interested in, and we can discuss about the course as well as motivating each other to keep in touch with the course (since it is very easy to procrastinate on all the readings, assignments, and lecture videos…)

The staffs are also very helpful and responsive. Mention them at twitter  and they attend to it at the very least in one day period. I find it very nice :)

4. It’s free!

I have found some productivity-apps-I-would-not-mention that has very good features, but it costs you a lot too. That is not the case in Habitrpg. Some items can only bought with gems, which you can get by donating money to the developers (since they mainly relies on this for funding), but even though you didn’t donate, the free features are fun enough. If you have spare money, why not, you should donate to support the developers since they already did a very good job (and get some gems to buy in-game items too! Consider this as a very pleasant side-effect ;)).

So, what are you waiting for? Come and join the journey to productivity  in the land of Habiticans! :)

Join the fun here : habitrpg.com
Follow the latest information from the developer of habitrpg : blog.habitrpg.com/ or their twitter account @habitrpg