All my great habits I’ve developed recently are because I made them daily recurring tasks on the same todo list of everything else I have to deal with.
Walking outside, drinking water, and eating breakfast are suddenly very appealing and easy to acclimate as routine!
wait this is why habitica is working for me, too! yay taskwarrior for you and habitica for me lol
Cool! And while I have ya, I’d like to express a concern I have without context due to no interest in otherwise interacting with Habitica, including being a downer and expressing so in that thread I liked of yours.
Okay, here goes: I think gamification is, hmm, in a simplified form, a type of hyperreal play, and like all forms of play, is a great tool for humans to wield. Being hyperreal, it’s obvious weaknesses is that it is radioactive to human curiosity. We are highly vulnerable to distraction when we activate those particular shamanic arts. And so… is there an inherent system that reduces itself from your life as needed, built into Habitica?
I reached for taskwarrior because I wanted something I had to be present with (I don’t sync it, so I work at my laptop) and wouldn’t distract me, instead just assist in laying out what I had to do. I’m not endorsing taskwarrior, I’ve read so many interesting perspectives on Mastodon (it is a dumping ground for first hand experiences of everyone’s flirting with a given tech/method/practice/trend), I tend to think folks find the system that most fits what they are doing. So this isn’t a question of: is that a good fit for you? It obviously is.
I’m just over here in raw nerve land when it comes to hosted whatever, and being a total Cassandra, my brain went to: hey, what’s the exit plan there? Like, how do you ever stop using it? My stuff is a JSON file. I can parse it wherever, or delete it and be done. But if someone is hosting it, and making cute graphics, and happen to have access to the largest, non-creepy dataset on habit-forming behavior, and money is involved, then the exit plan doesn’t seem to be in the users’ favor.
Haha, habits, amirite?
M E T A
yes! i have zero exit plan! and i’m okay with that. crazy huh?
well my exit plan is “when i’m bored, stop using it and lose all history probably.” which i’m also fine with. or like “get life in order enough to not need pets” but that’s even less realistic.
i can export all my stuff as a json file. i just haven’t done it and wouldn’t have anything i’d want to use to view it yet. i could make my own parser. i do wish for some tracker like “this is the time i took medicine every day for the last 30 days” on a graph and could make it but haven’t.
they throw away your data after 30 days or 90 days or … something. unless you’re a subscriber, in which they keep it a bit longer. but they still throw it away. i think that’s pretty awesome.
the community part is what i like. however, i also get that irl and here.
i want to be distracted by thinking about pets instead of thinking about how much i don’t want to do adulting. so yes you’re right–it works for me.