Becoming the back burner!

 

Habitica Crossover #4 | Becoming the back burner!

Note: 

• This post also functions as a teaser to the upcoming post detailing the progress of Life Challenge #4: Gamification.
• This will be the last post on this series for a long while, and it will decouple itself from the "Life Challenges" series

After a few months of using Habitica, I have found it increasingly difficult to maintain it as my mindset and my tasks have more or less migrated to the two new productivity tools that I have created to organise my life and inject some fun into my clearing of to-dos. These tools are namely, “Commitment Tracker” and “Motivation System”.

I can only share some basic information about these two productivity tools because I will be divulging the details of how they work in the upcoming post about my progress in the Gamification Challenge. To put it simply, the Commitment Tracker is to help me organise my tasks my regular cycles and quantify the value for each task (assigned to a commitment) to me, while the Motivation System takes these numbers and either process them into trends that give me a bigger picture of my productivity over a certain duration, or exchange them for rewards that I can enjoy, so as to give me the last push I need to complete a certain task and to give up a certain distraction or reward.

With these systems, they have effectively rendered Habitica obsolete for me. My usage of Habitica was mostly concentrated on its task management system. In comparison to that, I spend much less time engaging with different people on guilds or on the shop and stable for the virtual rewards. The pixel art loses its charm over some time, because I find that its visual appeal means nothing to me, and I have no actual use for these pixels on the screen.

For instance, these equipment does not make sense to me, because there are no monsters that actively appear at the “Tasks” tab trying to gobble my character up if I am lax in my checking off to-dos and habits. They only serve to enhance my attribute points, for which there is little use other than changing how fast one clears the quests (which is just a progress bar) and the rate at which one's health drops for a missed daily or a negative habit.

Another example of why I do not find the rewards provided by Habitica appealing is the system on its Stable. Although I admit that the pets look cute and value-added to the visual appeal of my character avatar, after a long time trying to get along with them, I cannot quite figure out what the use of them are other than being decorative items that can only eat food and grow (which I pity the pets and mounts for not being able to present themselves as lively creatures that actively bring joy to their masters and assisting their masters with various tasks).

How about supportive communities like guilds which are one of the biggest draws to this gamified task management site? In general, I feel that many Habiticians are either talking to themselves or responding to each other’s questions quickly. Unless one is lucky enough to join into a very supportive and family-like party, it is hard to develop any kind of relationships with other users or engage in deep conversations over productivity with other like-minded people. Maybe nothing will happen if I do not get the ball rolling, but this is not where my life interests lie, and I have other hobbies and commitments to attend to. As such, there is no reason for me to continue contributing to these guilds, unless there were some extremely kind guilds that would give me gems for completing something and I would be able to unlock something cool on the shop for them (still, it will only be for a very short time).

The fear of incurring penalties such as reduced health and mana, as well as getting hit by the monster of the party quest I am on, also contributed to my lack of willingness to check in to Habitica. I know that skipping on dailies and habits will be detrimental to my personal growth in the long run, but there were days where I felt so tired and burnt out that I wanted to escape the reality of holding myself accountable or responsible for all the tasks and habits that I am struggling hard to maintain.

All these negative experiences I had on Habitica had led me to the conclusion that I am able to make something that is better than this site and I will not need to pay a single cent for anything when I am designing the reward systems and progress trackers myself. Perhaps I am asking for too much, but it is worth a try to see what I can make on my own. As such, I have decided to put Habitica on the backburner and use it mainly as a source of inspiration for future ideas about self-improvement.

Semper prorsum!  V