Habit Judo

March 31, 2011 2:11 PM

Habit Judo
Folks seemed to like my system for addictive habit building via Farmville-esque intermittent variable reward. I thought I'd put up a spreadsheet on Dropbox for everyone to download.

Here's how it works:

You get RANDBETWEEN(1,10) for each habit you complete for each day. You log these on a spreadsheet that you update daily. Every at certain point levels that occur every ~3 days you get a self-determined reward. At point levels that occur every ~10 days you level up. I use a judo belt system. I'm now orange/green. I symbolize these by wearing a silicone wristband (e.g. the livestong bracelet type) of appropriate color for the relevant belt I'm at.

I began with 3 easy habits

1. Keep a ubiquitous capture device with you
2. Keep a to do list
3. Check in with the spreadsheet every day.

For every belt you level up, you get to add another habit.

Here's where I got the bracelets. (just an amazon link, I get no referral and I'm not affiliated with the bracelet maker)

posted by leotrotsky (14 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by maxwelton on April 19, 2011: Habit Judo

warning: first link is an excel file on dropbox.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:15 PM on March 31, 2011

Hey, I love this. Thanks!

Out of curiosity, do you have any suggestions for rewards? I am finding it hard to think of rewards that are small enough that you can repeatedly give them to yourself every three days (e.g. buying a book is too expensive to do that often; eating junkfood is something I'd rather not do more than once a week even as a treat...), yet actually motivating in some sense.

So far the only thing I've got is buying a music track. But I think that might get old quickly.
posted by lollusc at 4:55 AM on April 5, 2011

It depends. I try to stay under $10, and I've found the following thread very helpful in this regard:

http://ask.metafilter.com/181337/Tiny-luxuries

Personally I've rewarded with:

new ebooks
nifty apps & games for my android phone
nice looseleaf tea
comic books

Also, there's no reason why the reward needs to be purchased. I've also treated myself lazy weekends, wearing pajamas all day, walks in the woods, and to movies and TV on Netflix.

Oh, heads up to anyone reading this thread, there should be an Android app up within a week.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:58 PM on April 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

http://www.habitjudo.com/
posted by leotrotsky at 10:34 AM on April 7, 2011

Oops, that should be Habit Judo.
posted by leotrotsky at 12:53 PM on April 7, 2011

This is great! I'd love to see this as a social web app: you could log in, click "did it" for your habit, it could give you icons for belts when you level up... you and your friends could track each other's progress. I could write this myself, but I'm kinda swamped until end of May. Would anybody else be interested? I think I could get a basic framework up pretty fast...
posted by johnnybeggs at 8:27 AM on April 19, 2011

In the spreadsheet should there be a formula in cells K4, K5 etc to calculate the daily points?
In Excel and Libre I see no formulae so either they are missing or I am, as frequently happens, totally missing the point.
posted by speug at 10:08 AM on April 19, 2011

The Android App
posted by leotrotsky at 5:02 PM on April 22, 2011

Habit Judo makes the Guardian!
posted by leotrotsky at 8:58 PM on April 22, 2011

Heads up for anyone still reading this. We've updated the Android app to provide fuller functionality, and I encourage anyone who has so far held off to give it a try.
posted by leotrotsky at 12:47 PM on May 2, 2011

IPhone app is up!
posted by leotrotsky at 1:16 PM on May 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

leotrotsky - awesome. I got the iPhone app last night, and am really excited by it. My 9-year-old son and I have been doing judo habits now for about 3 weeks, and I am using it to coordinate allowances and chores for him. It's working great so far, and I'm really happy.

One of my complaints with the iPhone app, though, is that:

- I couldn't carry over my "experience points" or number of habits. So I am having to start over to use it, which stinks. That could be a deal breaker for some people trying to adopt it, though maybe not.

- What happens if the app crashes and I lose my data? With the spreadsheet these are all non-issues, but the app now has me a little nervous.

One more thing - wasn't there a youtube or something somewhere of someone using the spreadsheet? I can't find it anymore. I wanted to send it to my sister.
posted by scunning at 8:34 AM on May 24, 2011

Are there plans to do further development on the Android app? I recently started using it and it works, but is pretty basic.
posted by medusa at 2:36 PM on July 12, 2011

It looks like Habit Judo fell out of the apple app store, and the copy I have crashes in IOS6. Is it coming back?
posted by rmd1023 at 5:10 AM on October 7, 2012