Question: Google Reader tends in my opinion to be a bit over-eager to mark posts as read - if you click on a post or scroll over the top of it it will be marked as read.

Is there a setting to control the conditions for a post being marked as read?

Answer: 
[LiquidPlanner](http://www.liquidplanner.com/) seems quite good. It has a nice feature that shows the spread of task completion times based on past performance.

The again there is always [FogBugz](http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/) ;-)

Neither are free, although FogBugz does have various free for academic use options.
[Teambox](http://teambox.com) is not bad either. Email-centric too. :) You could self-host it or use their hosted solution. It has a calendar and Gantt charts. No game mechanics though :(