One click, and Notion becomes a game you actually want to open
I have a leopard called Leo, and if I scroll on social media too much he dies.
That is not a metaphor. He lives in my Notion. Good habits grow him, bad ones hurt him, and if I let him hit zero it costs me around three months of daily logins to bring him back.
Sounds ridiculous. It also works, and here is why.
You do not have a discipline problem. You have a nothing happens problem. You finish the task, nothing happens. You skip the gym, nothing happens. So your brain goes to whatever pays it today, which is your phone, every time.
Game Mode V3 makes something happen. One click and your tasks, habits, goals and workouts turn into an open world game, like something you would load on Steam, except the character is you.
It is built into SB7, my second brain 7.0, so that is where you land when you go looking for it.
First you pick your world
There are seven of them, and you live in whichever one you choose.
There is Lua world, which is the main one. A castle ward. A prince with a fox. A dinosaur ward that is basically Jurassic Park. A sky ward that looks better in light mode. A warrior with his bear. A cyberpunk ward. And a ninja ward I call Shadow.
Female covers come with it too, so the character on your dashboard can actually look like you.
Then you open Config, which is where the game actually starts.
You name your character. You set your age. You name your companion. Then you hit awaken, and that is you in there now.
Pick your difficulty carefully
Four modes. Easy, Medium, Hard and Legendary.
This is not a skin. It decides what a level costs you for the rest of the game. On Easy a level is 500 XP. Medium is 1,000. Hard is 1,500. Legendary is 2,000.
Hard is the sweet spot. Challenging, but not impossible to actually finish things.
And when you pick it, the system throws a confirmation at you saying hard mode will humble you.
It is not joking.
I put difficulty in because the same system cannot work for a student and for someone running a business. If everything is cheap you stop caring by week two, and if everything is brutal you quit by week one. You pick your own price.
Energy, and the thing nobody expects
You start every day with 100 energy, and it resets every 24 hours.
Everything you do takes some. An easy task takes a little. A workout takes a lot, and you can set the intensity so a hard session costs you more than a light one. Journaling takes energy, because thinking is work. Bad habits drain you fastest of all.
This came from Shadow Fight, which I played constantly as a kid. Every fight cost energy, and when you ran out you either waited or you paid. I never had a credit card back then, so I waited.
Some habits give it back
Not everything takes from you.
I have done a cold shower every single day for six years and it gives me energy every time. So in the template, a habit like that has an energy boost box ticked on it, and doing it puts energy back in your pool.
You decide which of your habits are the ones that fuel you, and the system respects it.
The fuel station
When you are running low you buy more with coins. A fresh juice gives you 15 energy for 19 coins. An energy drink gives you 500 if you can afford it.
And you can stock up before the day starts, so you can walk into a heavy Monday already past 100.
The crash
Here is the rule that makes all of it real.
You can only buy energy while you still have some. Hit zero and the button checks your balance and refuses you. That is it. You are done for the day.
The next reset gives you your 100 back, but it charges you 300 coins for it.
So the system makes you spend your day on purpose, instead of finding out at 11pm that it is gone.
I built energy because I used to plan twelve things for a Tuesday and finish four, then feel like a failure about it. The truth was I never had twelve things worth of capacity that day. Now I can see it draining, so I stop planning days I cannot physically do and I stop blaming myself for the gap.
Everything you do pays you
The Daily Arena is the page you live on. Your tasks, good habits, bad habits, journal, workouts and meals for today, all in one place.
Every one of those carries XP and coins. You see the numbers on the item before you do it, so you always know what finishing is worth.
Reading pays, reviewing pays more
Your books, audiobooks, podcasts and courses are in there too, and finishing one pays you.
But there is a trick. If you write a review instead of just marking it done, you get multiplied points.
That is deliberate. Finishing a book is easy. Actually processing it is the part that changes you, so the system pays more for the part that matters. Same with your notes and resources.
The big hits
Goals, milestones and projects are where the real numbers are. A goal pays around 1,500 XP and 2,000 coins. Projects and milestones sit a few hundred below that.
Experiments pay too, scaled by how many days you actually ran it. So a 30 day experiment you saw through is worth more than one you abandoned on day four.
The review multiplier exists because I used to finish books and remember nothing. Reading is easy and processing is the hard part, so I made the hard part pay more. And putting the XP on the item before you start it means you can see which things actually move your life and which ones just feel busy.
Skills and challenges
Your character has three skills. Willpower, Wisdom and Strength.
Each one levels with its own token, and the only place those tokens come from is challenges. So you cannot grow a skill by accident. You have to go after it.
The challenges are grouped by what part of your life they ask for. Books, audiobooks and journaling feed Wisdom. Tasks and projects feed Willpower. Workouts and calorie goals feed Strength.
Which means if you only ever do tasks, your Wisdom and Strength sit at zero and you feel it, because your rank needs all three.
There are well over a hundred of them, starting with things you will clear in your first month and ending on ones that are genuinely hard. Log 13 journals. Complete 20 good habits. Complete 100 tasks.
Some you can skip, some you cannot
If a challenge is one you genuinely cannot do, some of them let you spend comets to skip it and still claim the reward.
But not all of them. Some are locked, and the only way past is to actually do the thing.
That split is what keeps it honest. You get an escape hatch for the unreasonable ones, and no escape at all for the ones that are just hard.
Ranks, and why the game does not die in month three
Your skill levels unlock ranks. Ten of them per arc.
The first one only asks for one level of Spirit and three each of Mind and Body. The last one wants thirteen of all three, which is a long way from where you start.
And every rank you unlock multiplies your character XP. Hit one and your levels start coming in close to twice as fast as before. That boost stacks with the one your companion gives you, so the two of them together decide how fast you actually move.
Here is why that matters more than it sounds.
There is a challenge in there called reach level 999. In Arc 2 there is one at level 2,000. You could do a thousand tasks and a hundred goals and still never get near those numbers on raw XP alone.
The only way there is ranks. So you do challenges, which level your skills, which earn ranks, which multiply your XP, which finally puts the impossible challenges in reach.
That loop is the whole reason this does not get boring. Most gamified templates give you the same reward on day 300 as they did on day 3.
That is why ranks exist. Every system I ever built died around month three, because the reward on day ninety was the same as day one. Here the thing you are chasing keeps moving, and so do you.
Comets, and why I open it every morning
Comets are the rarest thing in the system. You cannot earn them from tasks, you cannot buy them cheaply, and you need them for the things that matter most.
There is one way to get them. You open the Battle Log and claim your day.
[IMAGE: battle log showing a missed day]
Miss it and it is gone. You can go back to yesterday, see it sitting there marked as missed, and there is nothing you can do about it.
That is the hook, and I will be honest about it being a hook. It gets me to open the template every single morning, even on days I have nothing planned.
And once I am in there, I end up planning my day. Because I am already there, and the page is already open.
I built it that way because the hardest part of any system is opening it. Not the tasks. Opening it. So I made one thing you genuinely cannot get back if you skip a day, and that got me through the door every morning for months.
Your companion
You do not grind alone. Mine is a leopard called Leo, and there are seven to choose from or you can build your own.
Its vitality climbs when you do good habits and drops when you slip into bad ones, and you can watch it move in real time. When it gets low you buy VT points with coins to top it up, same as energy. Its power is separate and comes from good habits and winning strict challenges, and as power builds your companion ages, which raises the XP boost it gives your character. So a companion you have kept alive for six months is worth real levels to you.
And it can die. Let the vitality hit zero and it is gone, it boosts you by nothing, and you cannot buy its power back cheaply any more. Reviving costs 100 comets, which is around three months of logging in daily.
So your scrolling habit can kill something you spent months growing. That was on purpose.
I added the companion because a bad habit never costs you anything on the day you do it. It costs you in a year, quietly, and nobody can feel that. So I gave the cost a face. Skipping your habits stops being an abstract thing you will fix later and becomes something going wrong in front of you.
Streak Wars
Two kinds of streak, and they pull in opposite directions.
You build a good habit, or you resist a bad one. Both count, because quitting something is work in a way most trackers refuse to acknowledge.
Winning a streak pays power to your companion.
Strict challenges, and the punishment
This is where it stops being a game you can lie to.
You set a strict challenge. Mine right now is a cold shower for 16 days. You set a reward for finishing it, which is normal. And then you set a punishment for the days you slip, which is not.
Mine is 200 push-ups.
The first miss is free, which I think is fair. After that you start owing. The system tracks what you owe, it sits there on the page, and it does not quietly forget about it.
Skipping costs you
You can skip a punishment. But it takes coins off you and it takes power off your companion.
The reward still claims normally. The penalty is not that your reward gets locked, it is that you pay for the skip out of your character and out of the thing you have been keeping alive.
And if you slip badly enough on a strict challenge, you start the whole thing over.
Rewards on their own have never been enough for anyone. You already know that from your own life.
Punishments are in there because I have promised myself things a hundred times and broken the promise with zero consequence. Writing down what it costs me before I slip is the only thing that ever made me stop slipping.
The Exchange, and buying your own rewards
Keys come from challenges, and the Exchange is where you spend them. You trade them for XP, coins or comets.
My honest advice is do not waste keys on XP. Comets are worth more, because comets are the thing you cannot get any other way.
And the big comet packs are one time only. There are three of them, and once you buy one it is gone for good. Not like energy, which you can keep buying forever. So think before you spend.
Your rewards are real things
You set your own rewards and attach them to anything in the system. A task, a project, a goal.
But you cannot just take them when you finish. They cost coins.
I promised myself a MacBook Pro M5 Pro if I finished building SB7. It took me a year. And when the project was finally marked complete, the reward sat there locked at 8,000 coins, which I did not have yet.
It also locks the other way around. Attach a reward to a task and you cannot claim it until the source is actually finished.
So the reward is real, and so is the price. That is the only version of a reward system that has ever worked on me.
I made rewards cost coins because a reward you can take whenever you want is not a reward, it is just a thing you bought. Making myself earn the MacBook changed how the whole year felt.
And then there is Arc 2
Everything above is Arc 1.
Arc 2 is the other side of the game, and it unlocks from Config when you are ready for it. Advanced, Expert, Master, Grandmaster, Mythic.
Finish Arc 1 first. Partly for the difficulty, and partly because leaving Arc 2 switched off keeps the template fast.
The three skills are there to stop you doing what everyone does, which is pour everything into work and let the rest rot. You cannot rank up on tasks alone. If you have not read anything in a month, your Wisdom tells you. If you have not trained, your Strength tells you. It drags your whole life along instead of just the part you already like doing.
The NPC knows your name
There is an NPC living in there, and it uses your name.
It fires when things happen. You take a punishment, you claim a reward, you let a streak slip, and something in the world says so. There are thousands of different messages, so it never starts repeating itself at you.
It sounds like a small thing. It is not. It is the difference between a spreadsheet you fill in alone and a place that reacts to you.
New: the Tarkiz integration
Tarkiz is my gamified deep work template, and it now plugs straight into Game Mode. Which means your focus sessions stop being a separate thing you track on the side.
Your flow stages in Tarkiz boost your character XP, and the deeper your water gets the bigger that boost grows.
The creatures you unlock in your reef add power and age to your companion, so the hours you spend focused literally keep it alive.
Tarkiz challenges now pay out keys, and badges pay extra gems, so your deep work feeds your skills and the Exchange instead of sitting in its own corner.
And the Ice you earn in Tarkiz can now save a slipped streak here. That one is my favourite, because it means a brutal week of focus actually buys you protection on a day you fall short.
Tarkiz is free, and it comes built into SB7.
Where to get Game Mode V3
Like I said at the start, Game Mode V3 lives inside SB7.
So when you click through, you are going to land on an SB7 page, and that is the right place. SB7 is the calm half that holds your tasks, projects, goals, habits, notes, health and finances. Game Mode is what all of that turns into when you click the button.
That is also why the game works. The quests are not invented for you. They are the things already sitting in your system, which is what separates this from a template that makes you log your life twice.
Tarkiz is built in too, so your deep work feeds the same character.
Setup takes about 15 minutes.
