Merging Habitica with Bullet Journaling

My use of Habitica is not as regular as when I was in Uni, due to the lack of access to a computer and some minor difficulties transcribing tasks into the app. I’ve reached a semi-happy compromise by combining it with my bullet journal.

I’ve been bullet journaling since 2013-ish, and I have a lot of old notebooks to show for it. Previously, I would painstakingly transcribe all my to-dos into Habitica (then known as HabitRPG) to tick of and achieve my hard-won gold. I even had a mini-icon I used in my journal to mark if the task was already on Habitica or to be transferred. I’d use a tiny doodle outline of a little sword, and the blade was coloured in “warrior blue” if I had transferred it across to Habitica. This was back before Habitica classes were established, so I was a mandatory warrior and I coloured the blade depending on which sword colour I had achieved at the time.

Now I just have a “habit” called “bujo tasks” which I click once for each of the tasks I completed for the day. Sure, it means less gold. But then again, it’s more challenging right? And I really want to get that Enchanted Armoire to give me something more than just experience points.

Now the other question is: why bother with Habitica if I have a bullet journal?
– Well, Habitica has my dailies! I can’t be bothered writing them everyday, and I’m not the type to use those daily task trackers (tried them and failed to be motivated by the bujo trackers).

So Habitica is my main motivator to make my bed every morning, take my vitamins, vacuum the floors, etc. All the boring stuff.

What about you? Is Habitica your only task list? Or, do you also combine it with another task-list method?

Adjustment

It is currently a time of turmoil in the land of Habitica!

Habitica had recently released it’s brand new layout and design with the aim for improved user interface. However, it’s been a headache for old-timers like myself to navigate, since we’ve been used to the old layout/design for the past 4 (5?) years.

As always, change is hard. Everyone knows that.

The most difficult adjustment in my workflow was the extra click required to create tasks. And increased difficulty into getting to my party guild (we have an extra secret guild for ex-party members as well as a place to socialise since our party chat is clogged with questing and spell notifications). It’s been about 2-3 weeks since the new Habitica has been released, and I’ll admit I had been excited for this release about 2-3 weeks before it was released as well. Hence, I’ve now roughly settled and adjusted to the new look/feel of the place.

My favourite things about this release are the improved aesthetics. I never thought I’d love the colour purple as I do now. It makes me want to buy the Habitica shirts (if only I didn’t live where the shipping would cost more than the shirt itself). The chat areas are more immersive and I love look at everyone’s costumes. The staff and moderators are more than helpful and the new release has promoted multiple Habiticans up a few tiers due to their assistance.

I’m not sure how the Habitica Wiki is fairing since almost all the old ways to do things have changed.

Overall, I’m happy with the brave and bold change and I cannot wait to see what the Habitica Staff plan to do next.

Party Organisation

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here and in that time our beloved HabitRPG evolved into Habitica, the land of productivity.

This post focusses on methods to make your party work well and cohesively, particularly if your party consists of people from various timezones.

My party has members spanning through over eight different timezones, so trying to fight a boss battle and take advantage of buffs can be a challenge. We typically aim to go through as many pet quests as fast as possible, but try not to let anyone miss out on pets, particularly if they can’t afford the gems to start a quest of their own. The following points are the things we do at the moment to synchronise our efforts and organise our questing adventures.

Cron Times

I created a google sheets document of each individual member’s Cron time as a reference to help us prepare for:

• Damage
  • To combat this we cast protective spells and have healers on standby
  • The spreadsheet can also help us predict if there’s going to be a party wipeout, so warnings are sometimes given and people spend all their gold just in case.
• Party Quest Commencement
  • On our party side-bar there is a list of active members that always accept quests. The Cron Spreadsheet allows the quest owner to make sure that everyone who wants to be on a quest can accept. It alleviates impatience and the mystery of knowing when a person logs on to accept a quest.
• Buffs
  • This helps us know if a person is likely to run out of buffs after their cron rolls over, so we can help support that person.

How does your party handle various Cron times?

Which Quest?

Our party has people that are at different stages of collecting quest eggs. So one party member took the time to create a “pet’s needed” spreadsheet. This was done based on the number of quests completed with the assumption that three eggs are awarded per quest. Hence when we finish a quest and want to start the next one right away, our party members can check this spreadsheet and see which pets are in highest demand and start that particular pet quest. It’s worked wonders and is well worth the effort.

A lot of parties I’ve heard of use the more informal (and far easier to manage) system of just communicating within the party chat.

Does your party have a different way to decide on quests?

Dealing with Party Members

When you’re in a party, there’s always going to be some trouble handling conflicts and tricky situations. I’ve addressed a few of the tricky situations my party has encountered below in this section and how my party handled them. As always, I’d love to hear if your party has done things differently.

Inactive Members

Most parties have a few inactive members, and the party leader has the power to “boot” them out of the party. There’s some negative connotation to booting members from a party, so the best thing to do is make sure some party rules are clearly visible to all party members specifying the party policy on “booting” inactive members. I had a discussion with my party regarding this and we all agreed that if a member has been inactive for one year with a warning three months prior to that date, that they will be booted from the party, which was actually more lenient than some parties I’ve heard about.

My party also has an “alumni” party guild where any current and previous party member can talk. No one can be booted out of the guild, so any members that have left the party, would still be able to access the party members via this guild if they decide to become active again or if they just wanted to chat to us.

How does your party deal with inactive party members?

Inviting People into the Party

I’ve read in one of the wiki forums and a few times in the Tavern that some party leaders get frustrated when a new party member is over eager and decides to invite twenty new people into the party within the span of a few days. Now, this is an extreme example of what happens when the rules of invites is unclear to new members.

Supposing all the criteria for a new party member are met (if there are any, such as an age limit or similar goals), there are a few ways to handle potential new members. These include:

• Time restriction (e.g. only able to invite one new member every three months)
• Member limit (e.g. each party member only able to invite one extra person to the party)
• Delayed invite (e.g. only able to invite after a certain period of time, like a probation period)
• Majority vote (e.g. setting up a poll and getting each party member to vote yay or nay to a new invite)

I’m sure there are other ways that other parties employ. My party chose the majority vote method. I set up a poll on our blog and made sure the majority of the party agreed to inviting a new party member before they were invited. I informed the potential invitee that there may be a delay of at most one week before they know whether they have been accepted into the party. It is a slower method, but ensured that most people are happy with who we’re getting into our small circle.

Orientation for New Members

My party never really had an orientation for new members until our most recent addition when I realised that our party was quite complex with links running off everywhere. It’s actually quite wise to orientate new party members if at least to get them familiar with the party rules or expectations. The new party member may feel overwhelmed if they’re entering a well established party, so a set of guidelines may be helpful with some introduction to the other members of the party and the running in-jokes so they can feel at home.

Conflict Resolution

This is always a problem, especially in an online environment. I always try to resolve this at a party level, however if things get out of hand, you can either contact the Habitica staff or your party leader to see whether it warrants that party member’s removal from the party. Most minor conflicts can be dealt with through good communication. It’s hard to portray emotions in an online environment, and misunderstandings happen all the time. Hence, I think the best course of action is to state when you’re offended, or if a certain wording irks you the wrong way and why. If that doesn’t work, and you still want your party member to remain in the party, it would be best to contact the Habitica Staff to help you with your situation.

Last Words

Well, that’s the last of the tips I have at the moment for managing your party and it’s members. I was planning on writing a piece on fun stuff to do with your party, but unsurprisingly, our Wiki has already covered that! So happy Habiteering and give me a shout out if you want me to write about any topics. :)

Integration: NerdFitness

My “Experiment” ended quite a while ago when I didn’t have time to complete my exercises and my priorities changed late last year.

Since then, I’ve commenced a new 6-wk challenge with NerdFitness (NF) mainly focussing on dietary changes and incidental exercise. I’m now in week 4 of this challenge, and have been going quite well.

I joined the NF guild on HabitRPG, and created a guild challenge to help complete the 6-wk challenge.

This was more of a general challenge template so I didn’t have to keep re-entering every time I decided to complete a 6-wk challenge. :) I made it available to the rest of the guild, because it was relevant.

HabitRPG has been the backbone of my motivation to keep me on task. Although I do take the 80% is good enough phrase to heart, because I’ve slipped multiple times during my journey. The details of which, can be found in my 6-wk challenge thread on NF. I would have never even stuck as long as I have with this challenge if I didn’t have HabitRPG reminding me every day and the threat of killing off my entire party during our boss fights definitely have me trying to avoid junk food more than normal.

It’s interesting to see how two games can intermingle and complement each other. In this scenario, I am indeed playing two different games. One for my general life and one that only focusses on my health. Both have unique and different systems to level up and gain skill points. It’s quite fun to see my two avatars battling it out at different rates.

Do you have any examples where you integrated HabitRPG with another productivity program?

For example, some of HabitRPG’s staff link their ‘To Dos’ in with Trello cards to get points for completing certain cards.

I’d love to hear about your experiences.

Using Tags to Distinguish Life Roles

Everyone has various roles in their lives and various tasks that match each of these roles. Hence I find it logical to divide my tasks on HabitRPG into these various roles to better manage my ever growing list of tasks. However, others find it better to manage their tasks via projects, importance or other means. This method I’m suggesting has suited me quite well, but obviously different circumstances means that it may not work as well for you.

It has been suggested as a feature to have “Alter Egos” where you have multiple avatars each representing a specific role of your life. Whilst this idea is similar to what I’m proposing, I think my idea is better in that you’re not leveling up a specific area but leveling up your entire person, hence one avatar is best.

In this method, each tag represents a specific role. For example, my roles in life are “student”, “role model”, “independent”, “moderator”, “pixellist” and “scribe”. Each of these roles has a set of tasks under each. Everything under the “role model” tag has all the tasks relating to my health since as a health professional, I am a role model to my clients. This tag includes tasks pertaining to healthy meals and exercise. The “independent” tag represents the things I should be doing as a normal functioning adult which I haven’t gotten into the habit of doing yet, such as making the bed, chores…brushing my hair (a surprisingly red habit now that I’m home for the holidays), etc.

As you can see, each of my roles has a list of tasks to complete and by clicking on the tag representing that role, I manage to set my mind to focus on those tasks. It works quite well for me since my roles rarely overlap.

The one feedback I’ve had regarding this system is “what about priority of tasks???”. To be honest, I kind of mentally sort out importance based on…feeling. Not the best way to combat that issue. However, I have suggested to that fellow habiteer concerned about prioritising tasks to try reorganising them linearly. If they’re using the four square system of “important/urgent”, “not important/urgent”, “important/not urgent” and “not important/not urgent”, then I suggested using those tags in conjunction with the roles tag. Primarily tag the task with the role and then assign and importance level to it. Hence when you’re working in the “student” tag for example, you can click on the priority marker and find which ones are high priority.

What’s your system of using tags? Are there any improvements you can make to my current system?

The Experiment: Day 11 – Long Distance

Whilst it isn’t advisable to crosstrain for more than 1 hour at a time, today I ended up with a cumulative three hours on the cross-trainer. It wasn’t a conscious decision to aim for this number, but rather coincidental. You see, I’m three days away from my exam and I fall asleep every time I open my textbook whilst seated. Recently, I discovered that reading my textbook whilst using the cross-trainer killed two birds with one stone. Exercising kept me awake and I retained the information that I read whilst exercising.

It doesn’t matter if I only take one step every 5 minutes or run full-out on the cross-trainer during that period of time. My primary purpose for being on the cross-trainer wasn’t to exercise but to stay awake whilst studying, hence I was in a state of light cardio exercise for that period of time and only running or taking the occasional step based on how I felt rather than forcing myself to do it.

It also made ticking off my dailies just that much more easier. Plus, for the first time ever, I am ticking off my calorie habit for meeting my goal because I happened to exercise off enough to offset the amount of food I ate.

Even better? I also finished my textbook on schedule. :D So not only did I get a few goodies to feed my pets, I also levelled up 3 times today!

Overall, a productive day that I enjoyed despite having to study for exams.

The Experiment: Day 10 – Off the wagon and back on again

Today was definitely not a healthy day, diet-wise. My excuse is…I really need a more inventive breakfast than pure cabbage to entice me so I don’t eat another steamed pork bun (which was my breakfast for today) and I had a wedding lunch that I attended today. By the way, that lunch was fantastically delicious and full of all unhealthy things that come with restaurant quality Chinese food, including soft shelled crab, sizzling beef, roast duck…I could go on.

On the plus side, I did contemplate topping it all off with a dessert of Ice Cream when I got home, but have since denied that desire since I was actually full and I listened to my stomach for the first time in ages.

For dinner, I’ll attempt a full paleo meal with a vegetable stir-fry and a piece of grilled salmon…and some fruit for dessert. :) I do enjoy a good piece of salmon.

I’ve yet to complete my body weight workout today, but I’ll definitely be doing that tonight when the weather cools down a bit.

The fact that I’ve lasted 10 days so far with this is quite encouraging. I can’t wait to see if I can make it to 20 days.

Edit: I’ve since joined the NF 6 week challenge which starts on Monday. I’m kind of excited about how that will play out. In the meantime, my “The Experiment” tag on HabitRPG currently looks like this in preparation for the 6 week challenge (no harm in starting now after all):

The Experiment: Day 9 – Paleo Transition

Keeping up with exercising 10 minutes a day hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be, and I also did a mini celebration last night at finally completing three sets of the NF Beginner Body Weight Workout. Granted, I’m still doing the basic beginners pushups (a.k.a. on my knees). I am aiming to progress to a proper push up soon, once I feel confident in doing those knee pushups without injuring myself.

My current avatar is the perfect set-up to my decision to clean up my diet.

My improvised dumbbells at the moment are a couple of empty pancake mix bottles from a few weeks ago filled with water, which weighs just over 1Kg, but are a bit easy to work with now. I’m planning to acquire a 2L milk once my family finishes the remaining milk. ;) So that would double my load.

So I’m happy with the minimal progress I’ve seen over the past week. I’m amazed that I’ve lasted a week so far and am keen to continue measuring my progress by what I can achieve rather than what I weigh, although I will continue weigh-ins once a week.

The new step in the process is to attempt a modified Paleo diet. There are a lot of websites promoting a strict Paleo diet, however my medical training makes me very wary of eliminating food groups, hence the word “modified”, which will allow me to utilise my knowledge of the human body and my known medical history to make a suitable diet for me.

But I’ve remembered how badly I yo-yoed with diets before and have decided to follow NF’s principle of making little changes over time. I’ve always been so keen to dive head first and change everything that I’ve always crashed and burned and 3 months later, I’m back to eating ice-cream, pizza and lasagne every other day.

Thankfully my current diet isn’t too bad, considering my mother is an advocate of eating vegetables and is very supportive of my efforts to lose weight. The first step I made today was to increase the ratio of vegetables to meat or rice. I usually eat 20% vegetables, 30% meat and 50% rice with fruit or icecream for dessert. Today, I’ve increased my veggie portion to 60%, meat is 20% and rice is 20%. Breakfast was actually completely just vegetables. My mother had spent last night blanching a whole head of cabbage and I just took a cup of the shredded cabbage and ate it for breakfast, so she definitely made my life easy. :)

My mother too, needs to lose weight, but doesn’t have the willpower to do so. She’s told me that if I can do it, she’ll follow my lead, which gives more pressure on me to do something. Furthermore, she’s pointed out that my Graduation is coming up in just over 1 year’s time and that those pictures would last forever as a milestone. Recently I looked at my friend’s graduation and saw she had gained twice her size since she started university and it was apparent in the photos, which gave me motivation to continue my slow path to a healthier weight and better fitness.

Another plus to fitness is the ability to walk up all the stairs at work without all the other docs laughing at me when I reach the top out of breath and sweating whilst they all look cool, calm and collected whilst giving me the knowing eye and saying “you’ve got to get fit”. Ward rounds would be so much easier after I’ve shaped up. I can’t wait to be able to achieve that next year. :D

3 Things to Consider Before You Join a Party

In order to get the most out of HabitRPG it’s highly encouraged to join a party. Parties allow you to join quests, fight bosses, socialise and create/participate in challenges. I personally think it’s one of the best highlights of playing HabitRPG when you remove all the bells and whistles. It’s the community that keeps bringing me back to my to-do list.

But there is more to just socialising when you join a party. A party can also help you heal, give you strength buffs, help you find more drops with the use of party spells. This is where problems might lie.

So without further rambling, I shall list a few things you should consider before choosing a party to join.

1.  How do you personally relate to your party members?

Will your party consist of friends and family? Or complete strangers you met through the HabitRPG community? Your devotion and dynamics within the party would change depending on who is in your party. I have a party of strangers who eventually became my friends. Our chat mainly consists of strategies, and getting to know you questions until we actually knew each other better. Families might have different dynamics. How you will feel killing off a family or friend’s avatar may feel different from killing off a stranger’s avatar when you don’t complete your dailies. You also have to consider the level of commitment a person has to playing HabitRPG. I’ve heard of family parties that are solely upheld by the parents because their kids aren’t as into it, or aren’t as motivated to complete their tasks. In fact, some kids get a kick out of killing off a family member’s avatar for fun by not doing their dailies in a boss fight.

You also have to consider whether the actions done in HabitRPG will impact family dynamics or carry on into real life. How pissed off will you be at the person in real life if the avatar you’d been levelling up for a long time suddenly lost a level and your favourite piece of armour…from a different class that you would never get back.  All because a party member didn’t do their dailies in a boss fight.

Some may find it more motivating to play with strangers as it’s added pressure to keep them alive. They have no link to you. You don’t want to be kicked out of the party. It’s less personal and more business.

2. What is your preferred playing style?

Do you aim to blast through as many levels as possible using all your spells you can possibly use? Or do you prefer to cruise along at a steady pace and let HabitRPG control the game elements? Your goals within HabitRPG can impact your party members. My particular party had split recently due to differences in goals. Half the party wanted to utilise mana to it’s maximum extent resulting in fun and exciting gains in levels, gold, etc. Meanwhile, the other half of the party were shocked at this change and wanted to chill and use HabitRPG with minimal mana use only as needed. This resulted in a discrepancy because party-wide mana buffs usually tend to give better stats than personal mana buffs. Hence resulting in a split of the party.

You need to make sure that your HabitRPG goals and playing style (especially in terms of using mana) matches that of your party so that everyone is happy and you have a cohesive strategy. Otherwise conflict can arise sooner or later.

3. Does your personality match that of the party?

This is different from the second point. Will your party be full of extroverts who chat away in the party chat, or introverts where the only action the party chat receives is when a member uses a spell? Will you be happy with the conversations your party members will have with each other. Or will the topics annoy you and make you avoid the place all together?

Stimulating topics within the party chat is a good motivator for a person to log into HabitRPG to continue their to-do lists. I find myself logging in for the conversation and finding my to-do list is the first thing I see, so I tick of my tasks first before heading to the forums.

However, if you dislike the people in your party where their personality (too happy, too sad, too many troubles, too superficial, etc) is not to your liking, you won’t enjoy being in a party very long. Especially if there is conflict in terms of sensitive topics that a party member refuses to stop bringing up. Be sure that some ground rules are in place and that your personality matches that of your party and you’ll have a good time.

So there you have it. If you consider these 3 aspects before joining a party, and are happy with your choice, then feel free to join and enjoy your HabitRPG success with your party. :)

Happy Habiteering!

The Experiment: Day 5 – My poor legs

According to NF (NerdFitness), this is technically a day 4 exercise, but after some discrepancy with the time zones, my daily emails arrive at 9-10pm at night…so I see them as insight into tomorrow’s tasks.

So today’s exercise was the “Basic Body Workout”, with a helpful video. Being the weakling I am, I chose to make my “dumbbells” out of pancake mix bottles filled with water which came to weigh just over 1Kg (1063g to be exact), which I believe is the lightest dumbbells you can buy…or was it 5Kg? I can’t remember. It’s been a while since I’ve been to the gym.

Anyway, the strength exercises started out easy enough. A 10 minute warm-up on my cross-trainer wasn’t too bad…I mean, that was what I’ve been doing for the past four days every day. Then came the squats. My thighs screamed in pain after the 10th repetition…and I struggled through 20 of them. Then the push ups. Of course, I didn’t try the full blown push-ups. I could barely get myself off the floor on my knees, but I did successfully complete 10 of them with my buttocks straight in the air. The lunges were torture on the thighs again. I was meant to do 20 but only managed 10 on each side. Thankfully the 15 second plank was the easiest thing for me to do, which might indicate my core muscles are in better shape than my peripheral ones. I attribute that to standing all day at work, I hear that can increase your core muscle strength. The dumbbell lifts were…easy? I may need to upgrade to a 2L milk bottle and see what happens next time. The jumping jacks were okay too.

So I was meant to do 3 lots of this exercise pattern. I managed to incompletely do 2 lots. The jumping jacks after the second lot made my legs quiver and shake each time I jumped, threatening to give way from exhaustion. I can feel my muscles will be sore tomorrow. I hope it’s the good kind and not the damaging kind.