FAQ
What people ask us most about habits in general and about Skillion in particular. If your question is not here, write to us.
It means applying video game stuff (points, levels, streaks) to what you do in real life. It fixes one specific flaw in to-do lists: you tick the box, it goes grey, it vanishes, and a month later there is no trace of anything you did. Apps like Skillion, Habitica and Finch turn what you could not see into something you can look at.
Read more →The 21-day thing is a myth: it comes from a plastic surgeon in the 1960s who noticed how long his patients took to get used to their new face, not from any habit study. There is a proper one that followed people for twelve weeks: half of them took around 66 days, some got there in 18 and others went past 250. It depends a lot on you and on how big the habit is. Drinking a glass of water runs by itself long before going to the gym does.
Read more →Because the novelty has worn off and it does not run by itself yet. The first weeks the new thing carries you; after a month the routine does. In between there is a stretch where you are pulling by hand, and that is where almost everybody falls off. You are not short on discipline: you got the timeline wrong.
Read more →No. In that same study, skipping one day moved nothing in the long run. What does the damage is what you do next: you miss Tuesday, decide you have blown it, and skip Wednesday too. A habit does not break from one miss, it breaks from what you tell yourself about the miss.
Read more →Three to five. The most common mistake when installing any habit app is creating fifteen on day one. Habit formation takes months, and sustaining fifteen processes for months is exactly what does not work.
Read more →Someone gathered up the studies on this and yes, it works, but it depends enormously on the person and on what for. Translated: it helps you stick with something you already wanted to do, and it will not make something you do not care about interesting. If the habit does not matter to you, no progress bar is going to fix that.
Read more →Routine, and that is not just my opinion. What fires a settled habit is usually the context around it: what time it is, where you are, what you have just finished doing. Hardly ever a heroic decision in the moment. Motivation is for starting, not for lasting.
Read more →It is a habit app that turns what you want to achieve into a role-playing game. It was born from The Sims: its founder liked that a character had skills with a bar that goes up as you practise them, and wanted that for real life. Every task you finish splits points across skills you invent yourself, and those skills level up. It is on iOS and Android, free at the core, with an optional subscription.
Yes. For free you get unlimited tasks, three active skills, energy, streaks, coins, the shop, Time Blocking, the widget and stats. Premium removes the skill limit and adds the AI, four themes, three avatar outfits and the custom period in stats, and lifts the caps on the Task of destiny.
Skillion is published on iOS and Android: you can download it from the App Store and from Google Play. Your account syncs across devices, so you can start on one phone and carry on with another without losing progress.
The starter tasks Skillion suggests when you begin are available in eight languages: Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian. This site and the blog are in Spanish and English.
By completing tasks. Each task has a difficulty that sets its base XP: 5, 10, 15 or 20 points, with a luck factor between 0.8 and 1.7 on top. It also splits the points you set across your skills, and those are what raise their levels.
Read more →They are your progress categories, and you invent them instead of picking from a fixed list. A skill stands for who you are trying to become: Discipline, Charisma, Inner Peace, Programming, anything. Every task you finish feeds one. Start with three, not fifteen.
Read more →A pool of 100 points that refills every day at six in the morning. Each task spends the points you set when you create it, and a rest task such as sleeping can give them back. It exists so the day has a ceiling and you have to choose.
Read more →Yes. When you create a task you decide how many points it gives each skill, and they can be negative. "Two hours of series" can add to Rest and take from Productivity. It is the way to log something you do that costs you somewhere else.
It is the view where you split your day into time blocks and attach your tasks to them. It has its own slot in the Skillion navigation bar, lets you save routine templates with their own icon and colour, and every block can remind you before it starts, with the lead time you choose.
Every day, on specific weekdays, a number of times per week or per month, monthly on a given day, or yearly. There are also infinite tasks, which go back to pending every time you tick them. A task can carry as many categories as it needs.
Yes. Skillion has a home-screen widget, and you choose from Preferences which categories appear in it so it only shows what you are working on right now.
The counter goes back to zero and nothing else: XP and level stay where they were, so there is nothing to freeze. You only lose points if you turned on the penalty for that task yourself, and even then you can skip it with no penalty from the expired tasks list.
Read more →Every repeating task carries its streak of consecutive days. At 3, 7, 14, 30, 60 and 100 days it pays a bonus of 5 XP per streak day to the main skill of the task. It is small on purpose: the streak keeps you company, the task XP is what counts.
A slot machine for tasks. You bet coins, the machine picks one of your pending tasks at random and you do it against a timer. If you finish, you get the bet back doubled, or tripled if it rolled a triple. If you give up, the bet stays in the machine.
At most one smart notification a day, and none from 22:00 to 08:00. It warns you when a streak of three days or more is about to break, when a skill has sat idle for five days, and if you stop opening the app, at 3, 7 and 14 days. Each kind switches off separately.
Two things. When creating a task, you type the title and "Configure with magic" fills in the rest: difficulty, energy, skills, repetition. And in Time Blocking, you describe your day by voice or text and it hands you back the blocks of the day. Both come with Premium.
Skillion gets you playing in a minute: you create three skills, every task splits its experience across the ones you pick, and you lay your day out in blocks, so you decide when you will do each thing and not just what. Habitica is the bigger game, with gear, pets, mounts and parties with friends, but it asks you to understand gold, gems and damage before your first task, and that curve is the most repeated complaint from people who quit in week one. If you want to start today and keep it going, Skillion.
Read more →Skillion, for a specific reason: it is the only one that, besides asking what you will do, makes you decide when, by placing it on a slot in your day. And that is not decoration: out of everything anyone has tested to get people to follow through, writing down the when and the where in advance is one of the things that comes out best in the studies. “I never find the slot” is the most repeated excuse there is. Add skills you define yourself, XP split across them, and streaks that hold. Free on iOS and Android.
Read more →There is no automatic importer in Skillion today. Habitica, for instance, lets you export your data as JSON from its web settings, but Skillion cannot read that format yet, so you would recreate the tasks by hand. If you are arriving with twenty habits, use it as a chance to keep the five you actually do.
Read more →Yes. Progress and your avatar sync across every device where you sign in to Skillion. You can pull down to force a sync, and returning to the app checks for changes on its own.
Deleting your Skillion account purges your data in the cloud first, as the GDPR requires. It is a deletion, not a deactivation.
Write to hello@skillion.app or use the contact page on this site. There is a small team behind it and we read the emails ourselves.