

HabitRPG – A free habit-building app that treats your life like a game - phreeza
https://habitrpg.com/

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dang
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=habitrpg#!/story/forever/0/habitrp...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=habitrpg#!/story/forever/0/habitrpg)

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midko
I've been using HabitRPG on a daily basis since April and overall I find it
useful. Things I like:

\- by far the thing I like the most is the streak counter on the dailies. It's
quite rewarding to see you've done your morning light workout 120+ days in a
row -- there's just no chance that you are gonna break that chain just so that
you nap 10 more minutes!

\- low management overhead - I usually spend 1-2 minutes on the website

\- character gamification: getting random food and pet drops and critical
chance for gold rewards; upgrading items with that gold -- all of these are
completely useless :) but even so, these things do give you a tiny mental push
to do that extra remaining task. Health and Experience points have similar
effects -- I've had days where my character was low health and it was getting
towards the end of the day (you lose health if you missed some dailies), which
made me consider whether I could quickly achieve one of the remaining tasks

\- distinction between daily tasks that are a 'must' and habits that are 'nice
to have' but I don't want to do every day.

I don't use the social aspect of it, so I cannot comment on that.

~~~
toyg
Same for me. There is no way that I'm going to break my 96 streak in "cleaning
up kitchen after kids breakfast", so my wife can reliably find the kitchen
clean every day and I have a routine to start the day productively rather than
going through Reddit.

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benjvi
There seems to be some recurring popular methods for habit formation and many
diffent apps. Each product has its own branding and different twist but the
most common themes seem to be (1)"not breaking the chain" (2)
precommitments/accountability/public shaming (3)positive feedback of some sort
- positive messages or gamification.

This is not a bad set of methods - there is some (varying) evidence to suggest
that each of these is effective in improving habit adherence. However, there
are loads more facts about habits that don't necessarily fit into this
paradigm so neatly:

\- Automaticity does not start to level of for a routine until at least a
minimum of 20 days for quite a simple task, and it can be many times longer
for more effortful tasks (like doing a daily workout). Average was 60 days but
with a very high variance
([http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.674/abstract...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.674/abstract;jsessionid=F5E9F5BFC7933360C8C73C2E062575D9.f01t03)
)

\- A single failed repetition "breaking the chain" does not have any effect on
the development of automaticity of the behaviour, only repeated failures tend
have a negative effect \- It has been suggested that it is much more difficult
to try to build multiple habits in parallel rather than serially (although I
cannot quite find an authoritative source just now)

\- Habits have a structure: Cue -> Routine -> Reward. It is useful to
understand the conditions and motivation for a routine before trying to
replace it (substitution approach)

\- Furthermore, if trying to establish a new habit to reach a goal you might
find that there is no intrinsic reward in the routine. It will be very
difficult to keep up the routine like that, and it may often be better to look
for a different way to achieve the same goal

\- Habit formation can in some cases be thought of as a rewiring of the
instinctive valuation system. For example a resolution to eat healthily might
be helped more by giving yourself more exposure to delicious meals consisting
of mainly vegetables, than by a purely willpower-oriented method

For these reasons - I tend now to think "less is more".It should be more about
focusing on one or two correct habits and continually reevaluating them than
to rely on a plethora of different external motivators to get you to do a
dozen different things every day

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eponeponepon
I can't quite see why this type of thing is so in favour at the moment. I also
find it slightly disquieting (although admittedly that's got a lot to do with
episode 2 of Black Mirror -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes)
).

It just seems like an unnecessary abstraction of willpower - if one already
doesn't have the willpower to (for example) limit one's drinking, what is a
cutesy game going to bring to the table? I mean, what's to stop me adding
"smoke five cigs" or "drink an extra beer" to the list of habits in this
particular example?

~~~
rprospero
I'll put your question into more concrete terms. I've tried this sort of
software before. I didn't cheat at it. However, every time I've tried it,
after the first month, I usually have several bright red messages indicating
how badly I'm failing at life. I then stop using the app, because it doesn't
tell me anything I don't know.

The apps all seem to be based on the idea of not breaking the streak. While
that's great when you have a streak of successes, it's frustrating when you
have a streak of failures.

~~~
visakanv
If you have a streak of failures, wipe the slate clean and start with
something smaller and simpler. For severe cases, it might be necessary to
start with something as simple as "brush your teeth 1x a day" and NOTHING
else. This can seem ridiculously juvenile, but I wasted years of my life
making little progress because I thought small things were too trivial to be
worth getting good at.

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spindritf
It's open source, too
[https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitrpg](https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitrpg)

~~~
johnchristopher
I wish someone would have forked it with a different theme (something like
default bootstrap text only instead of the 90's RPG look).

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ReAzem
We have deployed HabitRPG at work and use it to manage our sprints.

As far as we know, it's not really free and open source. There is hidden stuff
to enable "Diamonds" the item that lets you do every single fun thing in this
game.

So we have developped The HabbitRPG Black Market. It integrates into habbit
RPG and lets you buy diamonds: [https://github.com/titilambert/Habit-Black-
Market](https://github.com/titilambert/Habit-Black-Market)

I may be wrong and it may just be badly documented.

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Argorak
I am surprised how many of those habit-building apps completely ignore that
there is a weekend.

I've been using Commit for a while and - because I am a bit lazy in that
regard - committed to tracking my time properly every day (instead of as a
bunch after 2-3 days). (I usually keep a note around)

Now, I obviously don't do that on a weekend, but it still breaks my streak all
the time, which makes the streak kind of moot.

I have the same issue with GH streaks: I would enjoy if the whole system was
more lenient, allowing days off the chore.

~~~
phreeza
HabitRPG allows you to pick weekdays on which your daily activities are
active, so the weekend is actually covered. What I do miss is having tasks
that are weekly or monthly.

~~~
Argorak
Huh? I looked around but didn't find that. Thanks!

~~~
phreeza
Once you create the daily, click the little pen on the right, and the item
will expand and show a configuration, with the active days, among others.

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alkonaut
I quite enjoy "my life" the rpg. I could do without the grinding for items
though. Also, my characters appearance is frankly ridiculous and I have failed
to find a way of customizing it. I'm starting to think I picked the wrong
class to begin with.

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Aardwolf
Looks very interesting!

One thing:

> If your health drops too low, you die and lose some of the progress you've
> made.

I think when losing some of the progress, I would just give up on the game.
Real life would already be negative, so I wouldn't need something negative to
happen in the game as well, so the easiest improvement at that point is to
stop the game :).

~~~
toyg
_> I think when losing some of the progress, I would just give up on the
game._

I don't think anybody really dies while he's actually playing, in the sense
that you can easily salvage your character at any point by just deleting all
tasks.

The point of the game is to motivate you into doing chores; a low health bar
should give you the motivation to reassess your priorities, get a reality
check, and rearrange your tasks so that they can be dealt with more
realistically. If you can't do it right away, take a rest in the Tavern and
come back later with a better plan and a simpler approach: chuck all the "deep
red" items, and start with ONE OR TWO VERY SIMPLE TASKS you can reliably
achieve. Once you've got your health back, get more adventurous and start
adding hard stuff back in, slowly.

In most RPGs, if you can't defeat a monster, there is no point in immolating
yourself; it's better to run, hide, grind out easier enemies, and come back
when you've leveled up. The real-life equivalent is a honest reality check
about what you can and cannot do right away.

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k__
Advertising FB authentication and then telling me in the Android app how I
need to copy big strings from a webpage.

Bad UX ;)

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UweSchmidt
As a feedback: the German copy text ... does the job. Someone on the team had
German in school? Quick job from fiverr.com?

Graphics and UI look nice and engaging.

Philosophically, I'd consider that our society, our generation is already
living way more quantified and optimized than any previous generation:
Technology provides the numbers, the internet lets us compare ourselves with
the very best at anything.

With this game, you are also holding the carrot on the stick for yourself -
Leonardo DaVinci or Elon Musk didn't have to do that - something _else_ made
them do what they did.

Without meaning to trash your app entirely, I'd suggest

\- focus on that one task that _really_ moves things forward (instead of doing
push for secondary points)

\- staying alert for the effect of the (self-)optimization - megatrend on
employees, children etc.

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phreeza
I just thought I would post this here, I am not involved with the project but
I have been using it for a while, and I think it is a very nice example of
gamification being used for good. I am not even usually into role playing
games but I have genuinely managed to get myself excited about levelling up my
character and collecting gear.

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armansu
Being Beethoven [0] is another habit building iOS app. The idea is that you
adopt daily habits and rituals from the most effective and creative people in
the world. At the moment they have Richard Feynman, Lev Landau, Elon Musk,
Bruce Lee, Bill Gates, etc.

[0] [https://itunes.apple.com/app/being-beethoven-adopt-
daily/id9...](https://itunes.apple.com/app/being-beethoven-adopt-
daily/id908987642?mt=8).

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krat0sprakhar
Chains.cc[0] is another tool which on the same lines of making it easier to
build habits. It does not have any gamification elements, but it is still a
simple and nice app for tracking habits. Wish they had an Android app though!

[0] - [https://chains.cc/](https://chains.cc/)

~~~
visakanv
They still don't have an Android app? Damnit, I stopped using it because they
didn't have one, and that was like, a year ago.

