Something Habits Something Something

I cannot get the hang of mornings. So I get filthier and filthier and flabbier and flabbier. It’s a sorry sight. I read and take notes on all these workout routines, healthy eating habits, etc, etc. And nothing changes. GAH. I am clearly not adapting to my current reality (of working all day and having plans most nights and weekends).

I would typically approach this by making some kind of schedule, but it feels like that’s not quite enough to cut it. I started out doing what I always do:
Daily Routine
But then it occurred to me, what I need is something to prompt me to do these things every day. It’s all well and good to think really hard about it once or twice and then never follow through. These are daily tasks and habits, so I need daily reminders and nudges.

It turns out…there’s an app for that (yup…I’m bringing it back, folks). It’s called habitRPG, and it’s a ton of fun.

First, you set up your little guy…

Avatar Customization Screen

Then, my favorite part, you set up your tasks (or design your life, as I’d like to think). There are three categories of tasks: Habits (things you do regularly), Dailies (things you do once a day), and To-Dos (one-time completions).
A Few Days In

You also create rewards for yourself that you can earn by checking off tasks. For extra motivation, you can have competitions with others.

You can learn more from this quick little walk through. The presenter isn’t the most charismatic, but the features were enough to sell me.

I’m really excited to see how my daily habits change from using this app. Right off the bat, I wish they had a sort of backlog function. That way, I could put tasks there and then add them to the active lists as appropriate. For example, I want to go for regular walks with my husband, but not until the weather gets nicer. (Though…thinking about it, this also introduces the idea of Weeklies.) It’d be nice to be keeping track of that as something I want to do but am not taking on yet. It would also be nice to be able to drag between categories. I added a task to Habits that really should have been a Daily. I had to delete it and recreate it. Lastly, the mobile app’s not great, but it does the job for checking things off.
Pre-Canned Tasks
I highly recommend using this. And if you’re having trouble getting started, they have a really useful wiki page to help you out. Let me know how it works out.