My Apple Watch is generous and congratulates me for a full night’s sleep even if I miss my goal by a few minutes. My body, on the other hand, is more demanding and keeps reminding me I needed more sleep.

Back in July, I shared that I’d figured out how to use the Habitica API to create a Siri Shortcut for updating Habitica from my Apple Watch. A few weeks ago, Hypothesis user cormacauty left a comment on that post asking for more information about how I’d done that.

This post is a (belated) response to that, in the form of sharing the Siri Shortcuts that I wrote. Part of the reason that it took so long for me to get to this is because I needed to duplicate and edit the Shortcuts to strip out my API key—I’m happy to share my work but don’t want other people to be able to make changes to my account for me. I’ve now done that for both of the Shortcuts and replaced them with an untested but definitely-ought-to-work system where a user can find their own values for x-api-user, x-api-key, and x-client and put them in the corresponding text boxes, and then the Shortcut will work from there. The Habitica Wiki has some information on finding these values, and I’ll direct interested readers there.

I inherited from my mom a heart rate that just trends low—even lower if I’m exercising regularly. The doctors I’ve talked to aren’t concerned about it, but every morning, my Apple Watch freaks out, convinced that I almost died in my sleep.

Using Siri Shortcuts and an API, I just made a crude-but-functional Apple Watch implementation for Habitica. Very pleased with myself.

I am one of those people who responds to a lot of work coming my way by ignoring that work and instead trying to think about how to change my routines and workflows. With the summer coming to an end and a new academic year approaching, I’ve been reading productivity books, thinking about the software that I use, and wondering what needs to change.

switching to Habitica

In particular, as I’ve posted over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about switching habit trackers. I really like Streaks, but there are a couple of things that don’t sit quite right. Besides, to be honest, sometimes just changing things up feels like a breath of fresh air and lets me double down on picking up new habits. After looking into a few different options, I decided to give Habitica another try. I’ve used this gamified habit tracker a couple of times in the past, and besides the gamification gimmick, there are some things about it that I really like.

Yesterday, my spouse asked why my Apple Watch was named GTS Centaur, and I faced the difficult choice between saying it didn’t really matter and launching into an explanation of the 1999 space sim Descent: Freespace.