30 days habbit, November 2014: take a picture a day, track with habit RPG

I don’t know where the idea of the 30 day habit started, but I found out about it via Steve Pavlina, who may have invented it.

The basic idea behind this is relatively simple: you have some habit that you are considering adopting but aren’t entirely sold on the idea – so you try it out for 30 days (or 31 if that is the number of days in the month, since it makes it easier) and see if you like it; sometimes you adopt the habits, sometimes you do not. Sometimes you may not have been planning on adapting those habits permanently, but you were simply curious about what it would be like to try them.

I have previous written about my attempt at meditating for 30 days, this time I went for a much simpler goal: take a picture each day in november, then upload them to Instagram. Some of the pictures were taken with my DSLR and actually edited but when I was lazy I took most of them with my Android phone.

When I started this project I assumed I would learn to pay attention to my surroundings, which I did to some extend but when you are at work before the sun is up and you don’t get out until the sun is down what you can see is really limited – fortunately the kind of photos that instagram users turned out to love are long-exposure photos (no matter how crappy mine were they would always get at least six likes from random people) and you can only make those at night or with ND-filters, and I don’t have any of those.

Rather than use Beeminder to track my picture uploading, I used habitrpg.com a todo/habit tracker for total nerds. It uses all same gamification tricks used in World of Warcraft, but instead of slaying virtual monsters you do things like make you bed, flush your teeth, etc – or in my case take a picture. Plenty of fun, much more productive and I am totally in love with it. Habit RPG is also more flexible than beeminder, so on the two days I was ill I just had to check into the tavrn to avoid a loss of hit points.

I don’t have a 30 day goal that I am going to try in december, the month isn’t ideal for it anyway as I will be traveling to spend time with family and the days are even shorter than november, so there is even less time to complete the task of the day.