Conquer Your To Do List with HabitRPG

Today's guest post is brought to you by Tessa of Krmbal. Today she's sharing a tool that's great to help you keep on top of your to-do List and daily schedule.

Running a small business means there’s always something to do. It can be hard to stay on top of all the little things and making sure they get done. I've tried physical and virtual lists, I've tried posting a list with people who would keep me accountable, but nothing works as well for me as HabitRPG.

HabitRPG is an open-source program that treats your life like a role-playing game. It’s technically meant to help you build habits, which I think it does, but I think it’s much more powerful as a fun tool to help you remember your tasks and motivate you to complete them.

When you first sign up, you create an avatar, customizing it as you like. Later you can use money you gain from completing tasks to purchase armor and weapons for your avatar.

Then you create lists of your Habits, Daily Tasks and To Do’s. You can also edit your daily tasks to be done only on certain days of the week. You can also create tasks that are negative that you should avoid to hold yourself accountable. When you complete a task, you get points (or lose them if it’s a negative task) and at the end of the day, you may lose hit points based on whether or not you completed your daily tasks. You can also change the difficulty level of each task.

If you want the basic thing and getting points is enough motivation for you, then you’re basically all set. I’m that type of person, I wanted to mark things off and get points and level up and I didn’t really investigate any further when I first started using Habit. Then my friend Kelly from Craftypodes told me about the pets that you can collect as part of a feature of the game. Catch ‘em all, you say??? I was intrigued.

You can collect pets (and win the Beastmaster achievement if you collect all 90) by completing your tasks, which will randomly drop an egg, a potion or food. You can create a pet by combining an egg and a potion, each combination makes a different sort of pet. It turned out after Kelly told me to go look, I actually had some of each and was able to make some pets right there. Then, you can feed the pets and if you feed them enough, they turn into mounts your avatar can ride.

You can also get quests where you fight a boss monster and inflict damage by completing your tasks. You can join up with your friends and form a party to help defeat the bosses. Sometimes, they’ll have fun events where they’ll hold a worldwide quest to defeat a boss threatening Habitica. Once the boss is defeated, anyone who participated by completing a daily during that time gets rewarded. When a dragon threatened Habitica and was defeated, we all were rewarded with mantis shrimp pets & a mount! For Halloween & Thanksgiving all Habiticans got Jack-O-Lantern & turkey pets.

They also had fun things like costumes for Halloween and all the food for the pets had been turned into candy. You’re also able to choose a class once you hit a certain level where you can use special skills. I’m a Rogue, so I have skills that give me a higher chance of getting a random drop, more money or evade damage. The other available classes are Warrior, Healer and Mage and each has its own set of skills.

So far, it’s been a really fun way to make sure I get things done. Plus, it’s super useful as a business owner who has a very changeable schedule. Since I work as a freelance graphic designer as well as run Krmbal, my schedule can vary from day to day if a client contacts me and needs something done quickly. It’s nice to be able to have a To-Do List that I can add to and changes based on how long an item’s been in the list. HabitRPG color codes your tasks based on how long they’ve been uncompleted. For me, this makes it super easy to be able to keep track of what’s most urgent. You can also adjust each item's position in the list with a new update they've made, so you can put things in order if you work better that way.

For me, Habit works great. I've even added household chores to my habits list and I’m often motivated to go do one of them when I have down time because I might be rewarded with a random drop. I think it’s awesome that it’s totally customizable too. You add tasks that are relevant for you and decide if they need to be done daily, just once, or in-between. New tasks can be added as often as necessary and old things can be deleted if they're not relevant anymore. You can also use the app if you have a smart phone so you can add tasks or mark them complete while you’re on the go.

It’s a fairly simple program, but it can be an effective tool and it’s totally free. Plus, the developers are making it better and more fun all the time! So what are you waiting for? Head over to HabitRPG and check it out!

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