WeiQi - (Go) game based productivity tool

The article describes a productivity tool called WeiQi, inspired by the ancient strategy game Go (Weiqi), which transforms daily scheduling into a strategic game. It visualizes a user's day as a grid of 24 hours divided into 5-minute intervals, where tasks are dragged as "White Stones" and become "Black Stones" after 5 minutes of uninterrupted focus, visually representing conquered time. The tool also includes a macro heatmap view that aggregates daily focus data into a monthly grid, helping users identify peak productivity and distraction patterns.

Modern to-do lists are often endless, anxiety-inducing scroll-fests. They treat productivity as a sheer volume of output, leading to burnout. We wanted to fundamentally change how people perceive their daily schedule by treating time not as a list to conquer, but as a board to master. Having always been fascinated by games in general, and ancient games in particular, we found the inspiration in the ancient strategy game of Weiqi Go . In Weiqi, the board is finite, players place stones with deep intention, and the goal is to gracefully claim territory. We realized that timeboxing is simply the modern equivalent of this. Your day is the board 🏁, your tasks 📋 are your stones ⚫⚪, and deep, uninterrupted focus ⏱️ is how you capture your territory 🚀 We wanted to build an app that brings the tactile, satisfying, and intentional strategy of Weiqi to everyday productivity. WeiQi is a highly tactile, gamified timeboxing dashboard that turns your daily schedule into a strategic game of focus. Your day is visualized as a beautiful wooden grid of 24 hours rows and 5-minute intervals columns . You drag unstructured tasks from your Inbox onto the board. Upon dropping them, they morph into connected "White Stones," visually reserving that territory for future work. When real-world time catches up to a scheduled task, the app's analog clock smoothly morphs into a Pomodoro timer. White stones represent potential/ pending tasks—they denote scheduled tasks, planned breaks, or incomplete work. Solid Black stones represent conquered territory—deep, uninterrupted focus. As you work, every 5 minutes of unbroken focus triggers a satisfying 3D animation, physically flipping a White Stone ⚪ to a solid Black Stone ⚫. You don't just check a box; you visually conquer your timeline. If you stop a timer before the 5 minutes are up, the stone simply remains White. A timeline scattered with White stones visually represents a fragmented day lacking deep focus, making invisible distractions painfully visible. The Macro Heatmap with Monthly cum Weekly View auto-aggregates your daily Black Stones, generating a beautiful, zoomed-out Weiqi board that serves as a heat-map of your peak productivity 👩💻hours. It also aggregates white stones denoting your peak distracted 😥 hours. We built the project up in phases step-by-step using multiturn chats. In phase 1, we built Foundation and The Game Board Layout with ToDo list inbox, Game Board with other elements added like wooden clock, pomodoro timer, dashboard In phase 2, we implemented the Drag & Drop "Playing the Stones" mechanics for the Daily Board where tasks from to-do lists transform into tactile "White Stones" on the grid. In Phase 3, we implemented the logic of The Timer and Capturing "Black Stones" In Phase 4, we built up The Big Picture The Macro Weiqi Game which introduces a toggle switch to transition from the daily planner to a zoomed-out, auto monthly grid Days vs. Hours . This read-only board automatically translates the focused time Black Stones earned in the Daily View into a visual heatmap, allowing users to see their macro productivity trends at a glance. The most impressive feature MeDo helped create was the automated monthly board. This was the game changer. It helped me create beautiful UI elements by taking inspos.