Habitica organizes your daily life like an RPG

Translating what’s in your agenda into reality isn’t always an easy task. How often do we end up giving ourselves over to procrastination and I’ll-do-it-tomorrow? And yes, we all know how long “tomorrow” really is. That’s why finding new ways to stay motivated and get your daily tasks done is essential. Habitica does a great job at this using gamification as its premise: your daily job is turned into an RPG.

This free productivity app has garnered tons of limelight over time. It started three years ago as a webapp and now makes up part of the Android family. Habitica turns exercising, eating healthy, and finishing work projects into a sort of RPG. The way it works is super simple: you have a list of daily tasks that give you gold and experience points once they’re done, which makes your avatar progress.

The task list is fully configurable. Just indicate the activity name, difficulty, frequency, and a few other bits of data. How much gold and experience you get depends on the difficulty. You can also add different habits that work basically the same way as your tasks, but one difference: they can be positive or negative. If you do something negative, like for example waste time on Twitter instead of doing your job, it reduces your character’s life bar. But doing good things obviously has the opposite effect.

Getting gold and experience serves to improve your avatar’s appearance with new hairdos, clothes, and objects typical of the cloak-and-dagger RPGs: armor, pets, weapons… Even unlocking missions where you connect with friends get rid of evil monsters. Because the social component is another one of those things that Habitica doesn’t neglect: you can send messages inside the Tavern or join a clan to meet people or ask for help.