Workflow Tactics, Author at Workflow Tactics

Why I Wanted to Automate My Daily Routine

I had two things happening at once: I was terrible at sticking to basic habits like stretching and checking my finances, and I’d also fallen way too deep into the gamification rabbit hole. I was already using Habitica, which turns your to-dos and dailies into an actual RPG—you get XP for brushing your teeth, gold coins for taking a walk, and damage when you skip stuff. It sounds ridiculous, and yet here I was, a grown adult terrified of missing my Duolingo lessons because my avatar might lose a few health points. 😅

The thing is, even that wasn’t enough. I still forgot to log habits. Not because I lacked motivation, but because after client meetings and bouncing between 20 browser tabs, I’d just forget Habitica existed for the day. Zapier felt like the obvious fix—but, as usual, It Was Not That Simple™. I wanted certain actions to happen automatically: like checking a box on my dailies when I completed a related task somewhere else (like Google Calendar or Notion), or reminding me hourly to drink water if I forgot again. But Habitica’s API is a bit… eccentric, and Zapier doesn’t love dealing with it.

Still, the core idea was this: if I could set up a couple Zaps to connect regular life events to Habitica tasks, I’d stop dropping the ball. So I started poking into the mess.

Getting Habitica to Work with Zapier

First lesson: Zapier and Habitica don’t have a native integration. So, that’s fun.

I had to use Webhooks in Zapier to talk to Habitica directly via its API. It’s not hard once you know what you’re doing, but wow, it was easy to mess up at first. Here’s the absolute minimum setup you need:

**Step 1: Create an API Token from Habitica**
Go to your Habitica user settings, scroll to the API section, and grab your User ID and API Token. You’ll need those for every call.

**Step 2: Inside Zapier, use Webhooks by Zap as your Action step**
I set it to perform a POST request to create or interact with habits.

**Step 3: Enter Details Manually**
Zapier’s form asked me to input headers manually, which looked like:

“`
X-API-User: your-user-id
X-API-Key: your-api-token
Content-Type: application/json
“`

**Step 4: Format the JSON Body Depending on What You’re Doing**
If I wanted to complete a daily task in Habitica, I needed this:

“`
{
“completed”: true
}
“`

…and the endpoint had to look like this:
`https://habitica.com/api/v3/tasks/{task-id}/score/up`

That “up” at the end tripped me up for days. If you score “down” on a habit (like marking something bad, eg: “ate late night snacks”), you’d change the URL accordingly. Took me forever to realize that yes, literally replacing “up” with “down” changed the entire outcome of the call.

Anyway, that’s all assuming you already know the Task ID, which, no, Zapier doesn’t fetch for you proactively. You have to go into Habitica, click on a task, and grab its ID manually from the URL.

You also can’t easily create tasks through Zapier unless you build a more complex setup. So I kept it simple: I manually created all my recurring tasks in Habitica, then used Zapier to simply update or check them off.

If that’s sounding too manual for your taste, I get it. But real talk? Spending 10 minutes copying a few IDs beats fighting with a looping Zap every time my Notion tags change 😐

Mapping Real World Tasks into Habitica Actions

Actual daily habits don’t always map 1:1 to digital triggers. Like, how do you automatically mark “No Twitter before noon” as complete if you just… didn’t open Twitter? There’s no data stream for that. But habits like “Start morning journal,” “Finish client billing,” or “Walk outside”—those can absolutely be connected to calendar events, file edits, or other triggers Zapier can read.

Here’s exactly how I handled some of mine:

The trickiest one was the stretch break. I wasn’t stretching. At all. So I added a Zapier push button to my browser that I could click when I actually got up. Not perfect—just manual enough to require intent, but frictionless enough that I actually used it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

For anything based on timing, like “Read 10 pages before bed,” I used scheduled Slack reminders + a checkmark reaction as the trigger. I’d tell Zapier: if I added a checkmark to *that* Slack reminder within an hour of it being sent, count it done. That took about 16 failed Zaps to get right, not gonna lie.

Creating Custom Error Logging Because Things Break

I found out real quick: if anything about your Zap fails, Zapier often won’t alert you clearly unless you’re checking task history obsessively. Webhooks fail quietly if the task ID is wrong. Your API token can expire. JSON formatting can go off with one missing bracket. And you won’t always know.

So yeah, I built my own logging system. It’s ugly but effective:

– I added extra Zap steps that write each POST result into a Google Sheet
– Columns include timestamp, action performed, task ID, and HTTP response code
– If the code isn’t 200 or 201, I get an email sent to myself with a short note like

> “Stretch Break POST failed with 404 — task probably missing. Check Habitica.”

This has saved me multiple times. Once, I renamed a task in Habitica and forgot that doing so changes the ID. So for four days, I thought I was logging water-drinking victories but was actually just bouncing calls off a dead endpoint. 🥲

If you want to build something similar, just add a step after each Webhook POST in Zapier:

1. Use Google Sheets > Create Spreadsheet Row
2. Map the timestamp, task name, and status code from the webhook
3. Use a Filter step before the email alert: only forward errors (status not 200)

It’s nothing fancy but it’s way more reliable than relying on Zapier’s default task logs buried three clicks deep.

Dealing with Time Zone Weirdness in Dailies

Habitica resets dailies at midnight—but midnight *whose* time? That’s controlled by your user settings in Habitica, but I didn’t realize mine had silently shifted during a daylight saving switch. For about a week, I was racking up automatic damage penalties because my Zaps were logging completions just after Habitica’s “new day” started.

I kept seeing completed Zap logs from 12:03 AM but Habitica didn’t count the task as completed. Turns out, my Habitica “day reset” was set to 12AM UTC, but I’m in Pacific time. So my new day started at 5PM local. Yep.

To fix it:

– I went to Habitica > Settings > Site > Day Start
– Changed it from 12AM UTC to match my actual zone (you can set a custom hour)
– Then adjusted my Zapier schedules to only run before that cut-off

**Bonus fix:** For tasks that were failing to record due to the race condition (Zap firing *during* the reset), I added a short Delay For action in Zapier—just 3 minutes—so it never tried to fire right at midnight.

Using Slack Buttons for Manual Routine Checkoffs

A weirdly delightful part of this whole system is how much magic I’ve squeezed out of boring Slack messages. If you’re part of a small team or use Slack solo (guilty), custom Slack messages can act like a little dashboard.

I made a daily Zap that posts at 9AM:

“`
Good morning! Click what you’ve done below:

✔️ Meditated
✔️ Slept 7 hours
✔️ Took morning meds
✔️ Stretched for 5 minutes
“`

Each of those checkmarks is a custom Slack shortcut button tied to a webhook. Click one, it POSTs to Habitica using the task ID.

This approach is wildly satisfying because the feedback is instant—plus I get the dopamine rush of clearing both my Slack list AND Habitica at once. The only downside? Slack decided one day to deprecate part of the message button formatting I was using. So yeah, it broke again. But I switched to Zapier’s built-in Slack Actions and restructured the response triggers. Works fine for now… until the next update 😅

Using Google Calendar as Habit Completion Trigger

This started accidentally. I had recurring calendar events like “10PM: Lights Out” and “12:30PM: Go Outside,” mostly as nudges. But I realized I could use Zapier to watch for those events ending and then look for feedback—like Back-to-Back event attendance or completing associated action—to log into Habitica.

Here’s one I set up:

– **Trigger:** Google Calendar event ends and title matches “Go Outside”
– **Filter:** Event is not canceled, includes myself as attendee
– **Delay:** Wait 5 minutes (to avoid race with Habitica reset)
– **Action:** POST to Habitica, marking the outdoor habit as done

I tested it twice and it worked. Then I missed one day, and it marked the habit complete anyway because it only checked if the calendar event ended. Ugh.

Fixed it by adding a second layer: I also required a line in my physical activity tracking spreadsheet (from my fitness wearable) to confirm I had 100 steps during that hour. Very extra, I know. But now it only logs a walk if both the event *and* the steps happened.

What Tasks Are Actually Worth Tracking

I tested about 30 routine connections at one point, and honestly, most were dumb.

Here are the kinds of habits that completely tanked in automation:

– “Inbox zero” — because I’d spend 45 minutes moving emails around just to clear it
– “Didn’t use my phone before bed” — can’t track negatives cleanly
– “Mindful eating” — no behavior trigger ever worked reliably

What stuck:

– Anything with a clear binary event, like “uploaded podcast episode”
– Anything I could measure elsewhere, like “tracked my expenses” via YNAB
– Anything calendar-based, like bedtime or workout

The more ambiguous the completion criteria, the worse it translated into Habitica.

Plus, I realized that when too many Zaps were handling stuff for me, I started checking Habitica less. Why bother if everything’s being marked automatically? That’s when the damage hit. So I scaled back again, and now most automations just assist—not replace—my own choices. Which is exactly the annoying lesson Habitica is trying to teach in the first place 😐