Before exploring solutions, I found myself becoming part of the problem I was trying to understand.
Like many people, I experimented with different ways of organizing my days. I time-blocked every hour in my calendar, maintained lists of completed tasks, and relied on focus tools like Pomofocus to structure my work. Each approach worked for a while, but over time I noticed the same pattern, they gradually became systems I stopped returning to.
Around the same time, I was travelling frequently between Bangalore and Chennai. Wanting something meaningful to occupy those bus and train journeys, I bought myself a mandala colouring book and a box of crayons. I found myself genuinely enjoying the simple act of colouring. It was calm, tactile, and surprisingly rewarding.
That experience sparked a small experiment of my own.
On the last page of one of my journals, I began writing down small things I wanted to do and drawing a box around each one. Whenever I completed something, I coloured the box. Some days I coloured several. Some days I added new ones. On other days, I crossed a few out because they no longer mattered.
Unlike the other systems I had tried, I didn't stop after a few days.
Weeks turned into more than a month. One page became several. Without consciously trying, I found myself returning to this little ritual every day, not because I had to, but because I genuinely wanted to. Colouring a completed box didn't feel like checking off a task. It felt like acknowledging that I had participated. Even on days when I didn't colour anything, I still found myself opening the journal to add a new box or cross one out. Every interaction felt like taking part in the journey.
As a product designer, breaking complexity into smaller, meaningful pieces is already a familiar way of thinking. Interestingly, one of the strongest themes from my research echoed the same behaviour. People naturally broke larger goals into smaller, manageable actions and found their own ways of adapting whenever life interrupted them.
That overlap made me wonder: What if participating in progress could feel just as tangible in a digital experience? This question became the starting point for the first design direction.
This direction explores progress as participation, where every action, pause, and return becomes a meaningful part of the journey.
Before settling on a direction, I wanted to explore another way of thinking about progress, not as a checklist, but as something that gradually takes shape.
That thought reminded me of diamond art, a craft where hundreds or thousands of tiny pieces are placed onto a blank canvas, one at a time. The artwork is never completed in a single sitting. It grows through small contributions, and even when you stop halfway, the unfinished canvas still invites you to return. That feeling inspired this direction.
Instead of treating a day as a list of completed tasks, I explored the idea of treating it as a composition. Every activity a person chooses to do contributes coloured tiles to a blank canvas. Spending more time on an activity naturally adds more tiles, allowing the day to slowly take shape.
Time became the medium of expression. The longer someone chooses to spend on an activity, the more tiles are added to their composition. Five minutes creates a few. Thirty minutes creates more. An hour gradually fills a larger part of the canvas. Over time, the day's composition naturally reflects where time was invested, not through numbers or charts, but through colour and form.