I added so many dailies that I basically found the overhead of updating HRPG ate into the productive energy needed to complete the dailies, and ended up in a death cycle. I then decided to use it explicitly only for tasks at work, and have been keeping up with it ever since, but I do miss the sweet spot of personal life productivity that I hit before that crash.

I use it. I find that it doesn't motivate me too much to do things unless they're dailies or I treat them as such; for example, I've had "compliment someone" as a habit for months, but I don't think it's actually made me compliment people more except maybe a small burst when I added it. But I find it more rewarding (not necessarily more effective) than beeminder for dailies; I don't care about the yellow brick road, but I enjoy getting XP and gold and pets.

I didn't tried it, but I believe I wrote my own gamification system. It is a simple time tracking system with a history viewer, from which I clock in my activity for the day. I have my own goals that I tried to achieve everyday. It was very effective in keeping me working 30 hours each week for 7 weeks so far.

Have they fixed their memory leak problem? I stopped using it after my frustration exceeded a pretty reasonable threshold.

I use it extensively and it's been by far the most successful out of all the productivity systems I've tried. For one, I've stuck with it since February of this year, whereas most of my past attempts have lasted around a month. For another, there's enough community aspects to it that a couple of times when my productivity has been low I've gotten a lot of encouragement from the community to get started again

You and I were talking about this in IRC. I remember expressing a concern about HabitRPG that, while it does genuinely motivate me at the moment, I'm not sure what's going to happen when it ends: when I've upgraded all my items, when I've collected all the pets, etc etc. If I just start over, the new game will likely motivate me significantly less than the first time around. And more than likely I just plain won't want to start over.

I've been trying to think of ways around this gamification problem, because it plays a part in nearly every attempt at gamification I've seen. I think that, for one aspect of gamification -- motivating yourself to learn new things -- there is a way that at least sort of overcomes the 'what happens when it ends?' problem:

Skill Trees. Like This . Maybe a website, or application, that starts with just the bare-bones code for creating skill trees, and you can create an account and add a skill tree to your account from a list of existing searchable skill trees, or you can create your own skill tree if you can't find one that's appropriate for you and that will allow other people with similar goals to add your skill tree system to their account, etc.

Looks kinda interesting. When I was 18 or so, I tried setting up a similar system, but it failed for a couple of reasons. I'll give it a try. Since I've noticed that small (online) notifications (such as upvotes or reblogs) make me feel good, this to-do list might trigger a similar response.