We’re honored to have Team Habitica here on the Beeminder blog to tell you more about Habitica and about using Habitica and Beeminder together. They’re in some ways very different but also quite compatible! For new year’s eve we wrote a guest post for the Habiticans, introducing them to Beeminderland. Now it’s time to give Beeminder users a deeper introduction to the happy and happenin’ habit-focused habitat that is Habitica.
Hey busy bees! The awesome Beeminder team has asked us to write a guest post for them about all the ways that Habitica and Beeminder can work together to make you into your best self this year.
Wait, what’s Habitica?
Habitica (formerly HabitRPG) is a gamified website and mobile app for improving your real-life habits and productivity! You create an old-school pixel avatar that you can level up, like you’re in a role-playing game, but the catch is that you can only improve your character by improving your real life!
As you’re checking off your real-world Habits, your Daily goals, and your To-Do list, you’ll unlock features such as armor, pets, and even quests! We also have a social side, so you can join a party with your friends and issue each other Challenges to improve your lives. Plus, we’re an open-source community, so feel free to jump in and contribute!
You can access Habitica through our website. Plus, we have an iOS app, and we’ve just debuted the beta version of our Android app (with features like avatar customization and pets coming soon).
So how does Habitica make you more productive? You’ll divide up your tasks into Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos, all of which affect your character in different ways.
- To-Dos are the items on your list that you want to check off once, like finishing your thesis. By completing them, you earn gold to buy awesome things and level up your avatar to unlock more features.
- Dailies are tasks that repeat every day (or on certain days), like flossing or going to the gym. These, too, can award you gold and experience if you complete them, but if you skip them, your avatar will lose health.
- Habits are things that you do multiple times a day. Good Habits reward you, but bad Habits cause you to lose health.
So why use Habitica and Beeminder together?
Habitica can add some positive reinforcement and fun flavor to your Beeminder tasks — a bit of honey, if you will. You may find it easier to keep goals green because you’ll be motivated to earn all the fun rewards you get on Habitica — like earning that final piece of fish to grow your awesome skeleton wolf into a mount. There may even be some minor habits that you wanted to form that didn’t seem important enough for Beeminder — Habitica is very flexible, so you can include anything that you want to work on! You can get excited to complete tasks, but then if you need that extra edge, keep Beeminder’s tough love constantly working in the background.
We’re built around the idea of rewards, not just punishment (although some of our monsters pack quite the punch). To that end, we also have a whole column for rewards that you can earn with gold — either in-game equipment, or custom rewards that you define yourself. Won’t it feel good to actually earn that Netflix binge?
The other big draw of using Habitica with Beeminder is to gain the accountability advantage of our vibrant, friendly community! On our website we even have a Beeminder Guild for all of you lovely people. And of course, we also have some good old-fashioned competition… for example, a Challenge for keeping all your Beeminder goals green, so you can compete against other Habiticans for a prize.
The Beeminder-Habitica Integration
The best way to use Beeminder and Habitica together is through the official integration! This is a nifty Beeminder tool that automatically checks all your Habitica To-Dos, letting you aim to have either more completed To-Dos or fewer uncompleted To-Dos.
What’s the difference? You can encourage yourself to finish as many To-Dos as possible by tracking more completed To-Dos. On the other hand, if you’ve got too many To-Dos and you want to whittle them down, you can track your uncompleted To-Dos. Need more info before you decide? Check out the Beeminder section of the Habitica Wiki.
We hope that you’ll come join us in the land of Habitica! Say hello in the Tavern, set up your goals, and share your new year’s resolutions with us.