Guest Post: Beeminder and Habitica Go Together Like Bees and Carrots

Today we’re excited to bring you a guest post from our productivity pals at Beeminder! Read on to learn about our awesome integration, as well as how you can use Beeminder and Habitica together to ace your goals.

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Image credit: Shirtwoot

Hark, Habiticans! A new year is upon us and if you’re thinking about getting more serious about some of your goals and don’t already know about Beeminder then you are in for a treat.

From an aerial view, Beeminder’s a lot like Habitica. Beeminder helps you stick to plans that would otherwise get crowded out. Like Habitica, it motivates you to do those things you want to do but never find time for, or those things you need to do but you keep putting off because UGH.

But while Habitica takes the positive reinforcement approach — holding out a sweet carrot to your inner mule — Beeminder comes at it from another direction. The way we like to sum up Beeminder’s approach is that it combines Quantified Self with commitment contracts. Specifically, Beeminder plots your progress along a Yellow Brick Road to your (quantifiable) goal and if you go off track, it charges you money. Long-time Beeminder users find that those stings (get it?) are well worth it for all the awesomeness it induces the rest of the time. But if the thought of having to pay money is too scary, that’s perfect: you’ll be very motivated to keep all your datapoints on your yellow brick road. Beeminder doesn’t even ask for a credit card until the first time you go off track.

Despite, or maybe because of, how polar opposite the approaches are, we’d like to convince you that Beeminder and Habitica are quite compatible and complementary. Do you have any habits that you’re just incorrigible about? You can treat Beeminder as the nuclear option, or a safety net for things that are really important. Use Habitica for all the things that it does work for, and use Beeminder for things it doesn’t.

If you’re scoffing at this “things Habitica doesn’t work for” heresy there’s another reason you might like Beeminder: Quantifying and visualizing your progress. Even if you’re not into data for data’s sake, there’s a really nice side-effect of this: we show your cumulative progress. If you’re the type to get discouraged by a bad day, Beeminder is a striking visual reminder of all your previous successes.

The Integration

Did you know you know there’s an official Habitica-Beeminder integration? The integration counts your Habitica To-Dos and sends that data to Beeminder. (Still no Dailies yet. Sorry superfans! But keep bugging us about this and it will happen.) You can track your total completed To-Dos, or your remaining uncompleted To-Dos. Once you paste in your api key and user id (follow the “api keys” link, it’s easy!), we’ll lead you through the Beeminder goal set up.

The hardest part is probably deciding which type of goal to pick. If you pick “less remaining To-Dos” you’ll stay on track by completing more of your To-Dos. So if you feel like you have too many To-Dos, and you feel overwhelmed by them all, pick this kind of goal. You’ll have to keep whittling down the number of To-Dos to keep on Beeminder’s yellow brick road. Deleting a To-Do totally counts! Sometimes deciding not to do something can be the best choice.

A “more completed To-Dos” goal, on the other hand, is very straightforward and might serve to keep you checking in to Habitica if you sometimes go AWOL and let your creatures languish. Or if you have a specific project you want to focus on you can create a tag for all of its To-Dos in Habitica, and then create your Beeminder goal for just that tag. This’ll help you keep up steady progress on that project.

If you want to dive deeper, there’s a Beeminder section of the Habitica wiki and a Beeminder Guild.

With the new year fast upon us it’s a great time — or at least the traditional time — to review your goals and congratulate yourself on what’s gone well this past year. At the same time, consider what’s not working for you or areas that you’d like to improve. If there’s something that you’ve had particular trouble staying on top of even with Habitica’s help maybe you want to add a stick to Habitica’s carrot (or just start collecting more data for next year’s review) and add Beeminder to the mix.