The past few weeks I've been trying to make better use of my time than simply watching YouTube videos and neglecting to practise my languages. I've already told you how useful I find Duolingo as a tool, but the reason I've been using it daily is because it's one of the habits I've been training myself to pick up, thanks to an ingenious little tool which has been helping me pick up better habits.
It's called HabitRPG, and it works like a traditional 8-bit RPG: you get hit points and experience - you gain the latter by ticking things off your to-do list, and you lose the former by avoiding your daily tasks (for me, that's usually language practice and writing). Okay, so maybe not entirely like an 8-bit RPG. But the principle is the same; if you lose all your HP, I assume you die. I haven't been apathetic enough to try this yet.
It works on an honour system - which I am fulfilling by writing this (writing a blog post is one of my habits) - which, if you stick with it, actually works really well. It's got me writing again; for a few weeks I haven't touched my NaNo novel, and for even longer I'd avoided my other blog, to the point where it turned into me meeting someone I'd promised something to and never delivered: I'd look at it awkwardly, say "hi" in a quick mumble, and go on my way as fast as possible. But with HabitRPG, and the addition of a daily task to write fiction for half an hour, I'm getting back on track with my writing.
There are three categories of task: habits, dailies and to-do's. Your habits are things you should do often, or should stop doing; they can be positive or negative, or both, and doing positive things (such as taking the stairs rather than the elevator) gives you experience and gold whilst doing negative things (such as, in my case, eating sweets) take away you HP.
Your dailies are things you must do every day if you do not want to lose health. At midnight they reset, and anything you haven't done takes away from your hit points. For me, that's often writing fiction or reading forty pages a day (I'm currently reading the Three Musketeers, but more on that another time). They are, however, worth a little more, and once you've done them they're greyed out until the next day. The dailies list gives you a sense of accomplishment every day, knowing you have completed all your tasks once more, and the little incentives (such as the perfect days medals, and others for participating in special HabitRPG events) make you feel like you're really doing something good.
Your to-do's are tasks which might take longer than just a day, or things you only need to do once or twice. They're kinda like habits in that you don't lose HP if they're left overnight, but they also take longer to complete and once they're done, they're gone forever. There's a certain satisfaction in seeing all of your to-do's disappear one by one, no matter how slowly. And it's good for working out what absolutely needs to be done, the big "DNF" tasks which I somehow manage to do at times.
Now all of this is useless if there's no incentive to keep you going. After all, what's the point if you're still not going anywhere? And that's where the RPG element really comes into it: you buff your character, buy new weapons and equipment, pick up animal eggs which you can hatch as companions and then level up into mounts, and once you hit level 10 you get the choice to branch off into another class, which gives you even more equipment to buy! All of this paid for by your habit-gained gold, of course. But better than the class buffs are the rewards you can set yourself. For my part, if I get 20 gold I can go to the cinema, and 500 gives me a free pass to buy myself a DSLR camera. While the joy that comes from seeing your dailies cleared is one thing, the real motivation lies in not being able to buy things or do things until you have enough gold. Going to the cinema drives me to clear all of my tasks, simply so I have enough to do that. Oh, and also kitting out my character in cute new outfits, for some reason (it's true - the cleric outfit is kinda cool).
So that's HabitRPG. It's a useful little tool which helps you organise your life. It's helped me so far, and I'm level ten. It's fun, quirky, and it's always evolving - you get rewards for adding to the wiki or creating sprite art for them too. It's those little touches which make it more than just habit-forming; in its own way, it's as addictive as anything else. Now, if only there was a way to kick my HabitRPG habit...
Adieu!
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