A little friendly competition for focus, not busywork
Most productivity scoreboards reward looking busy. We’re building one that rewards the thing that actually matters: time spent in real, focused work.
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 we’re building, scores the one thing that’s genuinely hard to fake and worth protecting: time spent in focus blocks. Real, head down work. Not the number of tasks ticked, not the volume of activity, just the hours you put into doing the work that matters.
- Earn points from focused time, the thing worth defending.
- A team leaderboard that nudges good habits gently, never a guilt trip.
- Entirely opt in: if a scoreboard isn’t your thing, ignore it and nothing changes.
Tying the points to focus time is the whole design decision. You can’t game it by chopping up tasks, because tasks aren’t what’s counted. The only way to climb is to actually protect and spend focused hours, which means the leaderboard and your real output finally point in the same direction.
So the version Ravi might actually trust looks different. Nobody’s inflating their task count, because it doesn’t matter. 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 on the way, opt in from the start, and we’re shaping it with the teams who want it. 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’re building.