I’m a pretty busy person. I work two jobs, go to school full time, and manage Nerdophiles, when you add my horrible memory, I easily have like ten different management methods/tools to help me stay on top of things. I have a day-to-day planner, reminders on my phone, my Google Calendar pop-ups, along with enough alarm clocks to wake up my whole house if necessary. But, like most people, I suck at sticking to schedules and normally end up just skipping class and playing video games all day, foregoing all rhyme and reason.
Recently, however, I’ve started using HabitRPG and my life has literally become a competitive game. Even when I’m not anyone, I somehow have the need to finish as much as I can and get as much gold from the game as possible so I can buy ALL the things. The project is a task management site that literally turns your life into a roleplay game. The game part of the productivity site is the rewards that you get from completing tasks. You collect XP and gold as you go on, putting more value on tasks that have not been completed in a while so that they are an incentive.
The site is created by Tyler Renelle, who runs it by himself currently. His goal was to create a productivity manager that rewarded you for completing tasks instead of just giving you basic information, this would be an incentive to stay on the wagon with the game. With the New Year, I decided to join HabitRPG for fun, and it has steadily kept me in line as I’ve been going through the semester. I post homework on there as a to-do and cross it off as I complete things. I put up my online homework as a habit, along with working out, eating at home, and posting on Nerdophiles. My dailies consist of simple things like calling my parents, taking a shower, going to class, and going to work. The last two are harder to accomplish than you might think.
HabitRPG is completely open source, and available to take a gander at on github. It’s a relatively new idea, and I am loving it. It has recently gotten a bit of notoriety after being featured on LifeHacker, Kotaku, and Reddit. They have recently achieved their goal on kickstarter, that will help them fund for any problems that might occur as well as make many other cool ideas possible. Right now, you can level up, change your character’s appearance, get a pet, buy potions, upgrade armor, things like that. There is a chrome extension, that takes out hit points for being on self-assigned “bad” sites, like Tumblr or Reddit, and gives you XP point bonuses for being on “good” sites. The newest feature is the Party feature which lets you play the game with other friends (as seen in the first picture). They can see your vitals and stats, and you can see theirs. It is an accountability system, though it can only be accessed in Level 3. An exciting soon-to-come is the mobile app that they are developing. It’ll be able to go offline, as well as combine with other existing social productivity sites like Google Calendar, Astrid, etc.
Personally, HabitRPG is super helpful for me, so I definitely backed it on Kickstarter. I am the kind of person that feels good when they cross things off of a to-do list, and getting a reward for it just makes it that much better. I am currently at Level 5, which should tell you how difficult it is to level up in this game if you don’t stay on the ball. I am totally excited for all of the things that are to come, many of them will enhance the “game” aspect of the project, which will make a nerdy girl like me very happy. The only flaw I find in this site is the fact that when you initially start, there is no real guide as to how anything works (at least when I started). When I was asking people to join, they were confused as to what it was, and a lazier person would have just neglected it. But I know that that feature is being worked on, and any newcomers should take that notion in stride. As each day passes more things get added and edited into the site and I am keeping an eye out. In the mean time, I encourage everyone to check out the site and join!
English