Get started with Habitica
Turn the company's recurring routines into a game with levels and points, and avoid the list that is so long nobody keeps up with it after three days.
Last reviewed:
What Habitica is
A to-do list that pretends to be a role-playing game. You get a small character with health points and experience points, and it levels up when you do what you said you would do. If you skip a daily task, the character loses health.
It sounds silly until you understand why it exists. Doing things you should do is rarely a knowledge problem, it is a getting-started problem, and a level meter that moves is measurable proof that the week produced something. For a business, it works best on the boring, recurring things: bookkeeping receipts, updating the inventory list, writing the week's post.
Habitica divides the work into three types. Habits are things you want to do often without a schedule. Dailies are things that should be done on certain days. To-dos are one-off tasks that disappear when they are done. Do not mix them up, because that is where most people give up.
Windows and Linux Mint
No installation is needed. Habitica runs in the browser at habitica.com and works the same way on Windows, Mint and Mac. Create an account, choose the look of your character and you are up and running in five minutes.
There are official apps for Android and iPhone, and they share an account with the web version. It is worth installing one of them right away, because an app you check off on your phone gets used, while a tab in the browser is forgotten.
Your own server: no, not this time
Habitica is open source and the code is on GitHub. Running it yourself is not the same as running Nextcloud or Etherpad yourself, however. The project's own documentation describes the local installation as a development environment, meaning something for those who will change the code, not as a way to run your own Habitica for a company.
We therefore do not describe a self-hosted option here. We have not been able to verify such an installation that works over time, and half an instruction is worse than none.
Three things to do first
- Add four daily tasks, not fourteen. The most common start is a list that no human has time for, and after three days the character is dead and the app is forgotten.
- Set which weekdays each daily task applies to. A task that should only be done on Tuesdays otherwise drains health from you every day you do not do it.
- Create a group for the company and add everyone. A free Party (group) gives chat and shared quests but not a shared task board, that requires a paid Group Plan. If you actually want to see each other's check-offs, it is worth the cost, otherwise Habitica still works well as separate accounts with the same habits.
The most common trap
Adding real work tasks as habits. A habit in Habitica has no deadline and no requirement, it only gives points when you click. That means the task never reminds you about itself, and anyone who added the bookkeeping as a habit discovers at the year-end closing that it was never done.
If something should be done at a certain time, it should be a daily task with the right weekdays, or a to-do with a date. Save habits for things like drinking water, checking in with the company or going for a walk, that is, things where every time is a bonus and no time is a failure.
And when the character dies, which it will: that is not a judgment of you. It means the list was too long. Shorten it and start over.