I just returned from MICCAI, where I had a great time, met some wonderful people and got lots of new ideas! But, other side effects include sleep deprivation and generally not feeling very healthy because I haven’t been keeping up with my habits on Habitica. In this what I’m aiming to be short post, I share some experiences of keeping up with habits while travelling.
In Habitica you can “rest in the tavern”, which pauses your daily habits. This means not doing your habits for the day will not hurt you and your party. However, you can still complete the habits if you want and get rewarded for it, but the reward only benefits you, not your party (i.e. you don’t do damage to a boss, if your party is on a quest).
I think this is the first trip since I started using Habitica, which was several days AND in a different enough timezone. On other trips, I would usually not use the tavern feature, but instead disable the 1-2 dailies that I would not complete. But with the time difference, and having to prepare things on top of the conference, I thought the tavern was the best choice.
What I noticed when filling in the habits when I would open the app, is that most habits fell into three categories:
- Completed, but without thinking about it, such as walking 10K steps (my average for the conference is 15K!)
- Did not complete, but could have done so, such as stretching
- Could not possibly complete, such as exercise with weights which I didn’t bring with me
Since I knew no habits were going to hurt me and others, I didn’t even really try to “check in” with myself and see if there were habits I still needed/wanted to do. That’s too bad, because several of them are really good for me, and can be done in under 10 minutes.
I think a better strategy would have been to disable habits in category 3 for a while, and still try to complete habits in category 2. It would be great if Habitica had an option to “customize” you Tavern experience, but in the absence of that, here is how I think I will implement this next:
- Create a tag “Off during travel”
- Add the tag to all dailies which might fall into the “could not possibly complete” category
- Before going on a trip, filter dailies to only see “Off during travel” list
- Go through each displayed daily, and unselect all days Monday-Sunday, so the daily is never “on”
- Select the days again after the trip
If you use Habitica, would you use this type of method? Or do you prefer the Tavern as it’s available now, without any pressure?