Habitica Habit Tracker Review

Habitica, formerly known as HabitRPG is a habit tracker app for Android and iOS that also comes with an accompanying website to enable you to track your habits or keep ToDo Lists.

The concept is simple, you enter your habits, daily tasks and ToDos and then you have an easy way to keep track of what you do how much. The tasks are segmented in

• Habits (good and bad ones)
• Daily Tasks (also weekly or monthly possible)
• regular Todo Items

Also every task can have a difficulty. Drink Water for example I find trivial, but running 5k is medium/hard (at least in my world).

Habits also have + and - options, so you can define habits like

It's a plus when I chew gum, but it's negative when I smoke

Which is what I did. Usually addiction rushes last for up to 15 minutes, so if you can distract yourself for long enough to get over the rush, you can push the timing of your smoking breaks.

The overall mechanic of this gamified life tracker are that you have a certain amount of:

• Hitpoints (HP)
• Experience (XP)
• Coins
• Mana (MP)

and your hero can later pick a class like Rogue, Mage or Healer.

Bad habits cost you everything but mostly HP, so if you're not careful your character will die and lose a level, items, all their coins and so on.

Good habits, completing ToDo items and doing your daily tasks will get you XP and when you reach a new level, refill your HP to 50.

What I quickly realised is that when you pursue a bad habit like smoking, you lose more and more hitpoints every time you continue to do so. At first I lost 1 HP, at the end I lost up to 7 HP per cigarette. Smoking kills your character, fast! ;)

Habitica to Quit Smoking?

Well I haven't quite quit yet, since vaping with nicotine fluid still counts as smoking, but I smoked about 7 cigarettes throughout the last week.

The graphic above was made by pulling a CSV export from the habitica API and some custom code, I'll blog about that later as well.

Parties

You can also invite the rest of your family to join your Party and defeat bosses together (basically additional incentive). It adds a little competitive element and will keep you socially obligated to accomplish the goals you set yourself.

Summary

Overall it's a really cool and on top of that open source app that does a pretty good job at gamifying your life and helps you to achieve your goals. I've used the app and site for a little over 2 months and I am way more conscious of what I want to do more and what I want to do less off.

You can deploy it yourself if you don't want to give the intimate data of when you have a cigarette or a beer off to some random server on the internet.