The Keep:Dealing with Variable Goals

What if you have tasks which apply for a certain season, context, degree of health or a changing work schedule? Here is a compliation of some suggestions and ideas for tackling different situations.

Seasonal/Context challenges

 * Jane Doe has winter-only tasks (heat up car before work), and summer-only tasks (clean pool).


 * John Smith goes to university. During trips home, his college tasks don't apply. At school, his home tasks don't apply.

Doe and Smith create challenges for each situation following the approach in The Keep:Monthlies in HabitRPG. Doe has a Winter and Summer challenge in her household party. She also has a biweekly Housework challenge with biweekly household tasks.

Smith has School and Home challenges in his private guild named *The Scholar's Scrollbag*, when he leaves one place, he quits the challenge with the remove task option and joins the other challenge.

Always Completable Dailies

 * Rowena Roe has tasks for certain conditions (take out trash, shovel, go to bed early on a school night), and these are important enough that she wants to face a penalty if they are not done.

Roe words her dailies so there's always something to complete. Roe can complete, "Go to Bed on time" if in bed by 9 on a school night, and by 12 on Friday. Roe checks "Check trash, empty if full" complete if the trash barrel was checked and found empty. Roe's shoveling task has a single checklist item: "not snowing" which she checks off if it is not snowing. This offsets penalties and does not give as many points. Roe clicks "Hard" habit on hand to log extra effort if it was a blizzard.

Dovetail Dailies

 * Grace Goe has tasks that are due a few times a week which can dovetail neatly.

Goe has a daily named, "Clean Bunk". If she's at home, she cleans her bedroom, if at university, she cleans her dorm room. She has a daily named, "Walk/Weights" with a note to lift weights M,W,F and walk T,T,S.

Moving Due Days

 * Percival Poe has tasks that need to be done a few times a week, but not on specific days.

At the start of each week, Poe sets Eat Purple Carrots thrice weekly to due M, W, F. On Monday, he didn't eat purple carrots, so he moved it to T, W, F before the day's end. Tuesday he didn't eat them either, so it was moved to due W, T, F. Wednesday he ate none, so he made it due T, F, S. Thursday he knew he was out of days, he'd have to eat the carrots or suffer the penalty.

Poe schedules Reconcile Bank Accounts to Monday and his Pay Day. It helps him not to miss it.

Poe schedules his Check Post Office Box Weekly for Saturday. He marks it Easy, even though it's more Medium difficulty. He checks it off Saturday if he went once this week. He may also check it off the day he went, e.g. Tuesday.

Minimum Habits

 * Winston Woe has extreme variations in his health. Certain dailies apply (medicines, health tasks) always. He needs a way to avoid penalties if he's too sick at night to rest in the inn, and have dailies reset so he's can track his tasks.

Woe's daily list includes only tasks that apply when he's in poor health. Some dailies are grey, even though they are due, just so that he won't die if he's too sick to login in for a couple of days. He uses markdown to call attention to these grey-but-doable tasks: `Meal 5` shows up in red letters on a pink background.

Woe's habit list includes items that would otherwise be dailies. He has a +- 20m Project X habit. At the end of the night, he logs a - if he did no work on Project X. He has similar habits for other kinds of projects and household chores.

He periodically updates the lists depending on general health trends, sometimes swapping an item from a habit to a daily or vice versa.

Rewards.

 * Faramir Foe also uses habitrpg to help with his health tasks. He needs to stay out of the inn as much as possible to track his goals, but needs some sort of reprieve from time to time to compensate for the poor health.

Foe has custom rewards which allow him to buy a completion for a daily which is not actually done. Totally skipping a daily is more expensive than marking off a daily which was replaced by an unexpected to-do.

Foe also happens to be a Rogue with high Perception, and saves his Mana to cast a spell on sick days which neutralizes most of the damage as if he were resting in the Inn, but allowing dailies to reset normally.

Mix and Match

 * Hermoine Hoe has a four-day work week with weekends off and rotating weekday off. Norma Noe has a constantly changing shift.

Hoe uses habits for repeating items that aren't always due, and some grey items, as well as to-dos for infrequently repeating tasks. Noe uses a mix of the other methods.