Setting Up Writing Tasks With Habitica

Have you heard of this app? Habitica? I’m in love with it. So here’s the deal. You create a little guy or gal and then go ahead and set up tasks, to-do lists, or even habits. They could be writing related goals, like ‘Write one chapter’ or ‘Write 1000 words daily’, or something a little more simple like ‘Take the stairs’ or a habit like ‘Drink Water’.

Whenever you mark off the tasks or to-do items as completed, you get experience points. Eventually you can even have pets. Just a few days ago I hatched my first Skeleton Flying Pig!

I set up dailies for writing my 750 words, in addition to time spent studying the craft. I also tend to set up to-do’s for specific projects. If it’s a project I’m working on daily, like the folklore story I’m working on, I’ll put it there, too. You could also choose which days to have a task show up. Let’s say your schedule is tight, but you’ve managed to carve out an hour to write on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. You can set up a daily task and uncheck all the other days. On Monday it will appear grey on your main page, but on Tuesday it will show up as a daily for you to complete.

Another way you can use the app is to set up steps in a project. Let’s say you want to break a novella into ten writing sessions of four thousand words each. Or you have a big research project to set up with many different steps. Or maybe you do all of your pre-work before starting on a new project and you like to have character sketches, outline, maps, recurring objects, and scene cards all set up before you even type that first line. You can set up to-do lists and tie them all together.

If you log on using the computer, the app walks you through a tutorial and you receive a ton of xp. The mobile app isn’t as advanced (I didn’t get any tutorial) and has a few glitches (when I type in a task on my mobile app, it gets added twice, for example). But it works well for marking off tasks and they are updating the app frequently, so I imagine all those minor glitches will be fixed soon.

If you like working with others, you can even team up with another user and go on quests once you reach a certain level. A quest page details what seems like hundreds of quests already set up for reading more, taking up a new hobby, meditating, weight loss, whatever your heart desires.

I love apps like this, useful and fun combined. If you find yourself struggling to set up writing goals or want to create a habit of writing, I highly recommend it. Even if it’s just type one page a day, the app is a fun way to keep you accountable and you’ll see the digital pages pile up fast.