What is it?

Habitica is a free habit building and productivity app that treats your real life like a game. With in-game rewards and punishments to motivate you and a strong social network to inspire you, Habitica can help you achieve your goals to become healthy, hard-working, and happy. - Habitica Website

How does it work?

As with any RPG, you begin by creating your avatar. Then you go to work! As you complete tasks, you receive gold, animal "eggs," and other items to help level up your character. Your character has health and XP (also Mana once you reach level 10).

Habitica breaks down tasks into Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos.

The To-Do list is fairly intuitive. Basically, as you accomplish items you receive various amounts of gold, XP, and mana. The redder they are, the longer they have been on the list. These are for one-time events (i.e. Schedule a Doctor's Appointment).

Habits are designed to, well, help you form habits. Things like drinking water or rewarding eating healthy over junk food. These are things that you do frequently.

Dailies are tasks you want to accomplish each day. Things like checking on plants, doing homework, etc. You receive rewards for completed dailies, but at the end of the day, you receive damage for those left undone.

So it's a To-Do list?

Not quite. While this is what makes Habitica user-friendly, the guild and party features are what make it unique.

Guilds are groups of people centered around a specific idea. There are writing guilds, coding guilds, student guilds, art guilds, guilds for just about anything. Guild members create challenges for your actual life. For example, there are reading challenges that encourage you to read new books or reward you for exercising more. They also provide a supportive community with several different viewpoints to keep you on your feet.

Parties are groups of people working together to accomplish these goals. A member can be in several guilds, but only one party. This feature can be used with real life friends to keep each other accountable in completing tasks. You and other party members can also go on quests to get more XP and loot. Because of the teamwork required for quests, this helps keep people focused on finishing their own daily tasks.

Rewards

First and foremost, you can use the gold from tasks to upgrade the armor and weapons for your avatar. This helps you deal more damage/have more protection in boss battles during quests.

As you play, you also stumble upon various item drops you can use to catch adorable pets!

In addition to the cute animals you can find, if you're the type of person who loves to play video games, you may find that Habitica gives you external motivation to prioritize doing things for yourself. It makes you actually look forward to flossing and washing the dishes.

Habitica is also open for anyone to help in coding the website and apps, doing statistical analysis, creating art, writing quest stories, and every aspect of the site. So the community does a lot to give back. Whether or not you are a paid subscriber, you can be involved and find some really unique groups to join!

You can check out the Habitica FAQ here. If you are remotely interested I would highly recommend trying it out. As someone who has a lot to juggle and little motivation, if you take the time to set it up, this app will help to organize and gamify your life!