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In our ‘iThrive’ series, we present you with a variety of useful iOS and Android Apps that you can utilize to enhance your life and accelerate your personal growth. We meticulously select innovative Apps that have been shown to help people create beneficial changes in their lives. In this article, we look at the Habitica App, which can help you increase your levels of productivity while also promoting the development of new life-affirming habits.

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Habitica Profile:

App: Habitica

Cost: Free (w/ In-App Purchases)

App Focus: Productivity, & Habit Creation/Reinforcement

Habitica Overview:

If you are like most people, I’m sure that there have been a few times in your life when you have tried to develop a new beneficial habit only to resort back to your old behaviors after a few weeks. Replacing destructive behavioral patterns with life-affirming alternatives is challenging for even the most successful people in the world. Change, at any level, is something that takes time to manifest and the process often contains numerous obstacles and setbacks. One of the major problems with creating lasting change is the fact that we typically don’t see the payoff from our hard work until later in the process. This truth, however, doesn’t have to slow our personal growth down anymore.

Habitica, which has been featured in the New York Times, is an innovative personal development App that will assuredly help you achieve big and small goals alike. If you are in the process of getting in shape, quitting a destructive habit, or learning a new skill, Habitica can help you succeed by tracking your progress, rewarding you for the small positive steps you take, and connecting you with other like-minded individuals who will motivate you on your journey towards success. The developers of the App creatively found a way to increase the incentives for achieving goals and creating new habits, by ‘gamifying’ the real lives of users.

After signing up and downloading the free App, your first task will be to create a virtual avatar that is faced with the ongoing challenge of fighting off monsters. You then have the opportunity to enter your real-life goals, desired habits, daily assignments, and more sporadic need-to-do tasks into the App. In order to make progress with your avatar in the game, you need to complete the daily real-life goals that you set for yourself. After you complete any task for a particular day and mark it as complete, you receive rewards that help you to improve your avatar and advance to higher levels in the game. Developers also smartly integrated a feature that takes your avatar’s health away when you fail to complete the daily assignments that you set for yourself. While the game’s graphics are anything but stunning, the brilliant concept and cleverly integrated features make it well worth your while to give it a try.

Habitica allows users to enter their desired outcomes into three categories. Within the Habits category, you can enter your desired habits alongside with their unwanted counterparts. Within the Dailies category, you can enter the daily tasks that you want to regularly complete and assign the days of the week that you would like to do them. And within the To-Dos category, you can enter more sporadic tasks that you know you’ll have to complete in the coming days.

Whenever you are productive during your real-life, and mark tasks as complete in any of these categories, you receive gold and experience points. With your gold, you have the ability to unlock new content or select manually entered real-life rewards (think watching a movie or eating ice cream).

One of the most useful features that Habitica developers incorporated into the game is a social networking system that allows users to grow together. You have the ability to set up a group in the game and invite your friends to join you, or you can join random groups with like-minded strangers. Being held accountable can be an extremely useful personal development tool and Habitica creators smartly integrated this concept into the game. There are particular challenges, such as fighting bosses, which hold the whole group accountable for the daily successes of the individual group members.

Since being released in 2015, Habitica’s framework has continued to grow with additional functions and features. You can now access your gaming account through your computer and even set up a browser plugin that monitors and rewards you for the time you spend productively on the internet. The game’s developers are now also offering specialized plans to larger organizations, schools, and sports teams to help their members form commodore while also motivating each other to be more successful.

Today, there are over 1,500,000 people worldwide using Habitica to increase their levels of productivity and develop new habits. If you are in the process of working towards particular goals, or plan to set them in the near future, Habitica can be a great tool that will not only help you stay focused on your desired goals but also add a bit of fun to the achievement process.