HabitRPG

HabitRPG is a great combination of two things I have invested a lot of time in: self-tracking and role playing games. It has created digital incentives and tracking tools inside an interface that uses a framework familiar to gamers. For geeks like me, it’s a perfect combo for improving habits.

I grew up with role playing games, whether video games like Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda or tabletop games like HeroQuest and Dungeons & Dragons. HabitRPG takes the elements of hit points, experience, leveling and gear from RPGs and uses them to make the system of tracking very accessible. It’s easy to relate to the system because so many of us have interacted with games in the same way.

I’ve used a lot of tools for self-tracking over the past few years, but most of them either haven’t been robust enough or didn’t keep my attention. HabitRPG has so far succeeded on both accounts. Each day I’m motivated to check in as I accomplish goals and maintain the habits I am attempting to ingrain.

HabitRPG is under active development and has new features launching each week. Of all the planned additions, I’m most looking forward to integration with other tools such as fitness trackers, calendars, to-do lists and geolocation data.

HabitRPG is currently undergoing a Kickstarter to fund the development of mobile apps, customizations, party additions and other new features. I’m a backer and hope to see it become a success. Why not back it too?

A habit tracker app which treats your goals like a Role Playing Game. Level up as you succeed, lose HP as you fail, earn money to buy weapons and armor. The project is open source, and is live.

The ultimate goal of Habit is to plug into all your current tools – RescueTime, Fitbit, Wunderlist, MyFitnessPal, etc. Habit has an API for such integration, and is currently in use by a Chrome extension which monitors your unproductive web activity (read: Reddit, Facebook, etc), as well as by Pomodoro scripts.