A little friendly competition for focus, not busywork
Most productivity scoreboards reward looking busy. Arena weighs every finished task by the thing that actually matters: the time you spent in real, focused work on it.
The UnaTask team, Building UnaTask. May 30, 2026. 4 min read.
Ravi has seen productivity scoreboards before, and he doesn’t trust them. The last one his team tried rewarded closing tasks, so within a week people were splitting one task into five, closing trivial things for points, and looking busier than they’d ever been while shipping exactly the same amount. The leaderboard went up. The work didn’t.
That’s the trap with gamifying a task manager: do it carelessly and you don’t measure productivity, you manufacture theater. People optimize for whatever you count, so if you count checkboxes, you get more checkboxes and not one more hour of real work. Worse, you teach a team to perform busyness, which is the precise opposite of what you wanted. The metric becomes the goal, and the goal quietly dies.
Points for focus, not for noise
Arena, the light competitive layer in UnaTask, awards points when you close a task, and most of those points come from the one thing that’s genuinely hard to fake: the time you spent on it in a focus session. Press Start on a task, do the work, close it. Real, head down work, weighted by how much the task mattered.
- Points come only from focus time: about ten an hour, more for a task that matters more, and a fifth extra when you finish on time.
- A team leaderboard on everyone’s dashboard, by week, month or all time, plus badges, streaks and a feed your team can react to.
- Off until a workspace admin turns it on, and the Monday recap email is yours to switch off.
Tying the points to focus time is the whole design decision. A task closed with no focus behind it is worth nothing on the board, and an hour of focus chopped into five tasks is never worth more than the same hour on one. Splitting can’t earn you anything, so there is nothing to game. The only way to climb is the longer, better hour, which means the leaderboard and your real output finally point in the same direction.
So the version Ravi might actually trust looks different. Nobody gains by inflating their task count, because the count isn’t what’s scored. The thing that earns a little friendly status is the thing he wanted his team doing anyway: defending their deep work and using it. A small spark of momentum, pointed at the right target.
A scoreboard teaches a team what you value. Point it at focus, and you get more focus. Point it at activity, and you get a very busy team that ships nothing.
It’s here now, off by default, and one switch in your workspace settings turns it on. The aim is a reason to protect your deep work that happens to be a little fun, not a surveillance dashboard. Those are very different products, and we know which one we built.