Working and learning hard is great, but it depletes willpower and concentration. As a result, you end up just wanting to relax and play a video game. And here’s the problem: many are super achievers in video games but lack focus and motivation in real life.
So why not turn work, studies or any self-improvement into an RPG but with real-life results? Here’s our list of the best productivity games that turn routine work activities into fun.
Top 10 Productivity Games
1. Habitica
Habitica is one of the most popular RPG-style apps that help you improve your skills, focusing and attitude. When you feel bored with your routine tasks, learning or building up healthy habits, turn them into “monsters” and fight them one by one. When you complete a task, you progress in the game, and when you fail to get something done, you lose health and backslide.
You can cooperate with other players, get gear to build up your avatar, set up the system of rewards and compete with others. In addition to that, the app has extensions and add-ons to track your progress and use your data more efficiently.
2. SuperBetter
SuperBetter has helped many people to build up new habits, develop their skills and talents, and successfully pursue long-term goals. The author claims that the app improves mood and overall wellness as it helps reduce stress caused by too many daily to-dos, oppressing circumstances or a hard-to-tackle challenges.
The idea is using psychological strength we display when playing games for tackling real-life challenges. The main factor that gives us strength is belief in our ability to succeed, and the app increases it. This belief helps cope with personal challenges, develop good habits, learn new skills and improve ourselves.
To get inspired to become SuperBetter, be sure to watch this informative TED talk by Jane McGonigal, the creator of the app. There, she talks about how games not only give us more fun but also better our health and improve our quality of life:
3. Fitocracy
A fitness app that helps improve your workout progress. In its free version, Fitocracy offers various workouts for any goals and experience levels, logging progress, support, motivation and daily articles on the subject. The paid version includes a personal coach’s advice on nutrition (with a personalized nutrition plan), custom workouts and guidance on your way to your goals.
4. Chore Wars
What on Earth can be more boring than household chores, like washing dishes, making bed and cleaning the house? ChoreWars turns this process into a game with monsters, achievements, rewards and competition – everything you need to start doing chores you kept putting off for ages.
The users report that the game is especially efficient with children that are always reluctant to do what their parents ask. But, it can be helpful not only for big families, lazy roommates and coworkers: people who suffer from mental illnesses say that the app helps them remember what simple tasks need to get done.
5. Bounty Tasker
Bounty Tasker is an RPG to-do list that helps you plan essential tasks and have some fun while working on them.
Use the app to organize your daily activities, battle monsters, gain scores and earn new loot by staying productive. Thanks to its simplicity, the app is sure to make your to-do management experience more efficient, and its old-school 8-bit graphic style will bring even more joy into the process.
6. Epic Win
The developer’s description of this tool sounds quite simple: a to-do list with XP. But in fact, it adds adventure and fun to your life, making it easier to remember daily chores and get more things done. You can customize your profile as you want (and choose a super fun name, of course), set up a to-do list and start playing… or working.
For each of the tasks you accomplished, you receive points for intellect, stamina, spirit and other characteristics. As the authors emphasize, doing laundry is an epic feat of stamina, so it’s fair that you get stamina points for that. With more points, you move forward on the quest map, uncover new locations, and find rare items (because who doesn’t want a Helm of Questionable Appeal to put on the enemy’s head?). Users say that it is a great encouragement that helps increase productivity in work and studies from the first day of use.
7. Zombies, Run!
Most of us start doing sports to improve health or lose weight, and we all know the problem: the result promises to be great, but the process itself is disappointingly boring. To stay productive when working out and achieve your goals, try a gamified app like this. Instead of just walking, running or cycling, accomplish an important mission in the middle of the zombie apocalypse.
The app contains over 200 missions, and you can create your own ones, so you’ll never run out of motivation. Your results are stored online, so you can track your progress and share your results.
8. Productivity Challenge Timer
This app employs the Pomodoro method to help you achieve your goals through short intervals of highly committed work. It serves as a gamified time and habit tracker – when you manage to stay on tasks longer hours, you gain a higher rank. This way, Productivity Challenge Timer motivates you to work harder and show even more progress.
The app also has flexible timer settings, allowing you to change the length of your active intervals and breaks. Besides, it lets you review and analyze your performance stats for different periods, so you get better insight into your productivity trends and understand which projects eat up most of your time.
9. Forest
Forest is a popular website blocker that lets you stay focused and productive in a fun and meaningful way. It’s based on a straightforward principle:
- Plant a digital tree inside the app whenever you need to focus on an important task and get some work done.
- Create a blocklist with all the websites that keep you distracted and which you want to avoid.
- Concentrate on your tasks and projects to help the planted tree grow.
- If you fail and will visit websites from the blocklist, the tree will eventually die.
Following the rules set by the app, you are bound to beat your Internet addiction and become more productive. Moreover, you can earn Forest credits for not opening unwanted websites and staying away from your phone. Then, you can use these credits to plant real trees in different parts of the world. How cool is that?
10. Todoist Karma
Karma is a fun productivity game app developed by Todoist, the author of the popular to-do list tool. It does not turn anything into monsters or bosses: its method is accumulating Karma by being productive and accomplishing more tasks.
Set up your daily number of tasks you want to accomplish and earn Karma by achieving your goals. When you start using the app, the Beginner level is assigned to you. Unlock new levels by being productive and finally become the Enlightened! And don’t forget to share your achievements on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ directly from the app.
Bonus Product: actiTIME
If you need a slightly more serious and analytical approach to boost productivity, actiTIME is what you need. Plan your daily activities and duties with the tool’s project management functionality. Track hours spent on work (and any other things) in actiTIME timesheet. Then, evaluate your results by reading time tracking data in beautifully designed charts and comprehensive reports. In these three simple steps, actiTIME will help you make your behaviors more efficient and attain better performance results. And what can be more motivating than seeing yourself improving and your hard work paying off?
