In this article, I would like to elaborate on the reason why I seem to start posting in shorter intervals now.
Procrastinating on things is something we all are familiar with.
And if something doesn’t ache as much and makes nobody cry when omitted, you tend to leave it ‚for later’.
So I fared with my blog. I didn’t have much on the tip of my tongue and even less was asked to tell more stories.
Quite frankly, in recent times many areas of life suffered the fate of ‚Oh well.’.
Digital immersion becomes omnipresent, you get through the week by various ways of communication, entertainment or the now rare real-world-real-people interaction.
To be honest, even before some lifestyle choices were being lifted from our hands I felt some trouble designing my daily life with more constructive and even healthy elements.
So on some binging nights in the last weeks, I started making lists. Lists of my personal habits, positive and negative, of things I want to be doing daily in real life, of rewards for doing well.
So far so good, well meant thoughts and a pretty rounded concept in itself.
But I didn’t just make those lists to be lists. On paper they would have been hard to follow up on. I put them in a program called Habitica.
I thought: Would it make a difference, if I would use my smartphone for one more thing, next to compulsively looking for ‚new’ things where there are none?
And it did make difference!
Now, there’s another app and another website (the desktop version is even more effective) I keep visiting and checking and following up on.
The difference is: This app, this game has an impact on my real life. Every minute I spend using it means I have made a real life difference or plan on doing so. Many other games, I observed, only give back an in-game experience for the time spent with it.
That said, I myself am somewhat of a gamer at times.
Only that I prefer games that give me some sort of story or material that enriches my life when NOT playing them, too.
So, how does a game work, which gameplay involves real-life elements and is able to reshape an Oliver’s life in some regards?
In its core, it is a role playing game. Those feature a virtual character in a constructed scenario, whose fate is decided by you, the player.
In Habitica, you start out as a simple character and after you have completed onboarding, you can put in your set of so-called tasks and your journey begins.
I recommend preparing the lists beforehand, even thinking about them for some nights.
Those tasks are divided in several categories: Habits (positive, negative, both), Dailies (which hurt the character when left undone) and ToDos (one-off things to finish).
For tapping any positive habit or completing any Daily or ToDo you earn gold, experience and ever so often find some eggs, hatching potions, pet food and other things.
You can set one out of 4 difficulty levels for any task, so you can rank the earnings accordingly and motivate yourself to tick off that one burning ToDo, knowing you will earn fat cash and experience upon completion.
Experience makes your character grow and ascend to higher levels, which give you more features, lets you choose a character class and gives you skills and other perks.
Gold can be spent in gear, quests rolls, many other things and most importantly, in self-set rewards.
It would be too much to explain all the mechanics here, so I will only go on about how it made a difference in my own life.
The first requirement is commitment.
If you don’t want to live by a set of guidelines, which you set yourself, a game like this will hardly be of service.
Just keep in mind that you set all tasks yourself, be it ‚get up early’, ‚brush teeth’ or ‚spend time with family’. Little tasks, when benefiting your personal life, are quite as adequate as big ones like ‚clean windows’ (bi-monthly interval, higher difficulty for fat earnings) or ‚work out hard’ (5 days a week, high difficulty for motivation).
Anything that benefits your life and makes you actually do the things that surely would be ‚nice to have done’ is a step in the right direction.
Would you rather not clean out your hairbrush at all, or doing it regularly plus ticking off a task in the app, earning points towards the next sweet reward, piece of gear or the next level-up?
For me personally, I was very much astonished to just have given up certain bad habits only for the consequence of having to press the button that would hurt my character (and at the same time would prove me succumbing to the bad thing).
That was all I needed to overcome some things that became a bother over time.
I have begun to leave my smartphone out of shared meals, do no look at it anymore when watching a movie, straighten my sheets every morning, read more than I have for a long time, exercise, eat fresh things daily, maintain several healthy habits and plan on writing a blog entry more regularly. As soon as I have posted this, be sure that I will collect significant earnings. 
So I can treat myself to some of the various rewards, which now mean I have indeed worked towards them and lived another day doing constructive and good things.
For more fun and commitment, you can team up with a friend or colleague in a party and defeat bosses, find loot together and push each other towards the goals you set yourselves.
Not even mentioning all the pets you can hatch and feed and make your character look cool with as a mount.
So. I am playing another game. Every day.
This game makes me follow good habits, change up my lifestyle for the better and helps me choose to do the things I would usually leave ‚for later’.
In the end I have fun and feel like I have done at least something on even the dullest and darkest days.
I encourage everyone to experience this as well. If you choose Habitica or any other system is up to you and your preference.
And even the smallest thing you do is another thing done. Why not start today?
