wshaffer

Using Habitica has been like that for me. It made me finally keep a to-do list (which I've attempted in the past but always let slide), and when things got crazy this year, I started picking out a handful of things each day that were my to-dos for that day. They could be small (e.g. "call X doctor to schedule an appointment"), they could be things I was going to do anyway (e.g. going to that appointment), they could be checklist items on a larger to-do that was too big for me to kill off in a single day -- but at the end of the day, I could point to the items I was checking off and know I had accomplished some necessary stuff. As you say, it reduced a lot of the anxiety about how much I hadn't done.

Your approach to the half-year goals for work sounds eminently sensible.