Keeping Track

I wanted to talk about one more way I keep track of things because I really like this site and app a lot. It's called Habitica, and it's sort of a role playing game as well as a productivity tool. And it helps me remember all the daily tasks and routines I want to do as well as work on building habits I want to have and tracking to-dos. And it's really cute and fun. You can play on a team, join guilds, participate in challenges. Or you can just use it solo (what I'm doing right now--I'm not even hatching eggs for new companion animals and mounts right now, but that's another thing you can do) to track your stuff.

Why do I love Habitica? Because of the three categories of things to track (and they're all on one screen on the website, although on the app you do have to move between them). Plus, it's pretty and whimsical and makes me smile.

The Three Categories:

Habits--you can track when you do certain habits you want to build. You can set it up so that you give yourself a plus if you do it and a minus if you don't, or you can just do a plus for every time you do the habit. Currently I use the habits column for studying Spanish, cleaning my kitchen sink at night, reaching my daily Fitbit goal, and a few other things. I just give myself pluses, but you can experiment with how you want to do it.

Dailies--this is for things you want to do every day. You can edit it so that they only show up on certain days. For example, I have meal planning show up for me on Sundays so I can get ready for the week. I have "take probiotic" on every day because otherwise I forget. This is also where I put temporary dailies like the 30 days of blogging I'm doing right now. You can also add checklists to your items--I have an evening routine with things like set out clothes, set up coffee maker, wash up and others that I want to do before bed. I have exercise set up for every day, but I've created a reward where I can buy skip exercise for some gold coins. It's a pretty nice and flexible system.

To Do--This is your basic to-do list. You can make single items or items with checklists so you can keep track of one-time things you want to get done (I really like this for projects I'm doing). You can set deadlines on these to help encourage you to get them done in a timely manner.

There *is* a learning curve to Habitica, but they walk you through it in small steps to help you learn it. And there's a guild that's all about helping out and answering questions, so the learning curve is easy enough to navigate. . If you're looking for something fun and a little different to help you get things done, I definitely recommend trying this out (it's free!).

Let me know if you try out Habitica. And what other apps and things do you like for helping you get things done? I'd love to hear about what you use.