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Do Your Hardest Task First is a productivity strategy users can implement with the help of Habitica. The basic idea is to focus on the most difficult or unpleasant tasks as early in the day as possible. This strategy can be helpful for several reasons. For example, in the morning, people often have more mental and physical energy, as well as fewer distractions and scheduled tasks. Additionally, the sense of achievement after completing a difficult item on the to-do list makes it easier to approach the rest of the list.
Useful Tools in Habitica
- Difficulty: Set the Difficulty (Edit task > Advanced Settings) of tasks and reap rewards accordingly. Setting key tasks to "Difficult" provides incentive to complete them since they will yield more rewards once completed.
- Sort: Drag and drop tasks to sort them by difficulty in descending order. This makes the most difficult tasks more conspicuous and reminds the player to complete them first.
The default tags: morning, afternoon, and evening
- Tags: Give a special tag to key tasks and use it to hide all other tasks until the key tasks are complete.
Overcoming Potential Obstacles
Breaking down your To-Do list: A harder item on your To-Do list is often not really just one job, but may be comprised of many smaller steps. It's easier to do a smaller portion of a hard task than trying to take it on all at once. When part of a task is already done, it's easier to find the motivation to finish it. Therefore, to avoid feeling stuck, first determine what smaller steps can be taken towards the harder task. This can be achieved with Habitica in two ways:
An example of a checklist
- Add the smaller steps as individual tasks on your To-Do list and tick those off one at a time. A good sign that an incremental task is sized well is a feeling of relief to complete it, without feeling exhausted in the process.
- Create a checklist including each step making up the hard task.
Too much to do: The opposite danger of having a few extremely hard tasks is having too many little tasks. To clean up a cluttered To-Do list, group related items together under a single task. For example, Dailies like "Make the bed" and "Put away laundry" could be grouped under "Tidy room." Also, "Make the bed" and "Put away laundry" could be created as checklist items as reminders to complete those steps.
Boredom: If a task isn't interesting, it's worth considering whether it can be altered to make it more suitable to your playing style or whether you can make a challenge from it. For instance, it can be more fun to work out every day after offering members of your guild or party a challenge for doing the same. Also, remember the difficulty level of particularly boring tasks can be increased to help motivate yourself.
Lack of motivation: Habitica does not punish the player for not completing their To-Dos. Because of this, some players may have difficulty going that extra mile to complete their most difficult To-Dos. The Self-Imposed Challenges page provides players with suggestions on how to push themselves to finish these To-Dos (for example, Poisonous To-Dos). See the Burnout page for more tips on addressing lack of motivation.
Further Reading
- Eat That Frog! ... by Brian Tracy
- Compass : Big Rocks from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits
- The Tiny Guide to Creating the Flossing Habit from zenhabits