User blog comment:Rabidcentipede/Balancing the game/@comment-24150802-20140112001813

I also used to worry about how to enter and balance my todos but then I realised that waa counterproductive. HabitRPG is at heart a productivity tool, so I enter tasks in whatever way that makes the tasks easier to accomplish. Generally that means adding every task that I don't want to forget, no matter how small it is, and if I happen to get a Gold potion drop for "take towel to work", that's just the luck of the game. :)

I don't feel that this devalues larger tasks because I have enough large and small tasks that they balance each other out in the long run. For that reason, I never bother to adjust the difficulty of a task; I always leave it set to the default of Easy. I usually have a lot of tasks that I'd consider to be super-Easy (but they must be in my list so they do actually get done!) and some that could be considered Hard, so leaving it all set to Easy means the extra rewards I get for the simple things makes up for sometimes not getting large rewards for Hard tasks.

It's also much less mentally stressful to never worry about exactly what difficulty level each task is. I know that if I started trying to rate my tasks, I'd obssess about getting it perfectly correct. :)

It also helps that, even before HabitRPG, my strategy has always beed to break up hard or time-consuming tasks into smaller "next actions" (individual tasks in HabitRPG and hence more rewards), and to give myself permission to do only a tiny amount of work on a task if that's all I feel like doing (which sounds lazy but "little and often" is a VERY effective method for overcoming procrastination) - so if I start a task but don't finish it, I am allowed to tick off the task and reenter it. Of course, that does depend on the task - I would never tick off "wash the dishes" if I'd left half the dishes sitting in a sink full of cooling, congealing water. :)