Establishing Your Tasks

''How do I setup my tasks and habits? What rewards should I use? Should I put everything on my lists? How Can I keep Motivated? How do I combat Red-Tasks-Inurement? ''

The one word answer: Experiment

To Begin= Jump In!

Write down what you want to do today—off the top of your head.

Then go start doing them.

Add more items as you think of them. You can adjust tags and other task settings later.

Be Realistic. Start Small. Keep your daily commitments few as you begin. If you have a lot of tasks you want done every day or most days before you go to bed, consider making some of them grey, so you can check them off, but you won't be penalized if you miss them. Later on, challenge yourself by assigning some of those grey tasks to a day or days of the week. If you find you're floundering, re-evaluate your trimming back your commitments: go back to starting small.


 * -|Your Goals, Leveled Up=Should a given activity be a goal in HabitRPG? be easy, medium or hard difficulty? be broken into multiple tasks? be a Reward?

Here are a few considerations:


 * Do long task lists overwhelm you? Are your critical tasks are getting overlooked? If so, keep your lists short. Focus on your current goals and struggles.


 * If the task requires effort to remember or will help establish your routine/schedule. If you remember to Eat Breakfast, it might still be helpful to list it if you are establishing a morning routine.


 * Whether assigning difficulties would be motivational or tedious. If the latter, just ignore the feature. If Breakfast is disagreeable or difficult, set it so, reap the extra points, and never mind that Johnny Habiteer says it's easy—unless you are in his party.


 * If a task is a highly pleasurable activity, or you're apt to get carried away and read for 2 hours instead of 20 minutes, you might make it a reward.


 * Do you like to see everything at once? List your routines step by step. See also, The HabitRPG Planner

Unless you are in a party, it's up to you. In fact, you don't strictly have to follow a feature's intended use—BUT if you ignore it, you may run into some problems. For example, if you add every task you wish you could do in your daily list, you may well find yourself dying often.

Frequency. Sometimes changing the frequency (more or less often) will make it easier to be consistent with a task. Examples: a little every day, or every other day, or weekends/weekdays or Mondays, longer repeats (habits)
 * -|How Much?=Here are some ideas for experimenting with quantity and frequency.

Quantity. Break tasks into smaller chunks or combine tasks always done together into one, depending on whether you need encouragement to get started, help remembering smaller tasks, or a shorter, simpler task list. Assign difficulty accordingly—if desired.

Habit Dashes. Try picking the smallest quantity (eg. 1 page) or time (set a timer). Make an easy habit to record this. Start. Don't stop before the minimum. If you want to go on, do and record that, too.

Enforced Breaks. In this case, you would pick your amount of work or time and stop when the minimum is complete. Take the break. Do not skip the break. Go on only after the break.

Time-Based Goals: 20 minutes of exercise, 1 hour of reading, 15 minutes of dishwashing. Result-Based Goals: walk to the coffee shop, run 5 miles, Complete Lesson 1

In some cases, timed sessions combined with a final result help, especially if the task is too large to be done in one day and has no clear milestones along the way. Example combinations: daily Project X for 20 minutes and todo Finish Project X. Habit 15 pages of reading, todo Read Book X.

You can drag-and-drop items in your lists to reorder them. Here are a few ideas for ordering them.
 * -|Ordering Your Tasks=
 * Chronologically
 * by Priority or Urgency, so for example your top three MIT's (Most Important Tasks) would be at the top of your todo or daily list.
 * by Success: worst (dark red) to best (green), for example.


 * -|Curing an Ailing List=Discouraged? Many orange/red tasks? Dying Frequently? Revamp Your Lists.
 * Re-evaluate. Reduce your commitments. Make dailies grey, recreate them as Habits, or even delete them.
 * Dove-tailing. Setup the reward so it's waiting for you; start task; enjoy reward. (For example, put a cake in the oven, then go exercise.) Alternatively, enjoy reward while you do your task (watch tv or listen to an audiobook while exercising or folding laundry). This can be useful if you wouldn’t have time for the reward otherwise.
 * Share. Join a Party, Guild or use the Tavern. For example, there's an ongoing informal challenge to do one dark red todo every day and report success/failure in the Tavern.
 * Aim for excellence. Don't just wash dishes, shine the sink. Don't just wash the car, polish until it's gleaming. Do it to the point that you take pleasure in the completed work, it offers its own reward.
 * Rename. Use verbs and galvanizing titles. Describe so as to remind yourself why you want to do it. The item's notes, if not otherwise in use, can remind you that Conquer the Dungeons means Clean the Basement.
 * Consider Your Motivations. Ultimately, no amount of cookies, games, weapons, armor, gold, is going to make you do a task you don't care about. Know the ultimate reasons why you aim to do each goal or defeat each bad habit.