Tarkiz: The Gamified Deep Work Notion Template That Pays You to Focus
Long deep work sessions are boring, mate.
You sit down for two hours, you actually finish, and nothing happens. Nobody claps. Nothing on your screen changes.
Meanwhile your phone is paying you something every few seconds, all day, for free.
That is why I kept quitting my own sessions halfway. I would plan three hours and last forty minutes, then go back to the thing that gave me something right away. It was not laziness. Focus pays you in weeks and months, and your brain wants paying today.
So I built the thing that pays today. It is called Tarkiz, which means focus in Arabic, and every session you finish pays you.
So what is Tarkiz
It is a gamified deep work Notion template. You run focus sessions, and finishing one pays you tokens that you spend on a game sitting underneath it.
And I did not hold back on this one. I packed tricks into it that I normally keep inside my premium templates, because I wanted the free one to be the good one.
It is free, and it runs on its own. You do not need any other template for it.
Starting a session
You create a new session and give it a name, which is just whatever you are locking in on.
Then you pick a type. Deep Work, Study, Creative, Admin or Reading. That is for your stats later, so you can see where your hours actually go.
Then the length. There are presets from 25 minutes up to 4 hours, or you type your own if you want something odd like 90 minutes. You also set how many breaks you want, and one line on why this session matters.
Then you hit start, and the automation does the calculation and tells you exactly when it ends. It carries a Notion reminder too, so you get a notification when your time is up.
If life interrupts you, pause works. The elapsed time is banked, so pausing does not break the clock.
About the breaks
Breaks are not a free-for-all. Every focus block has to be at least 20 minutes, which caps how many breaks you can take out of a session.
The break length scales with the block. Under 40 minutes gets you 5 minutes. Between 40 and 69 gets you 10. Seventy or more gets you 15.
And you only earn on focus minutes. Break minutes pay nothing.
Then you collect
When the time is up the session finishes on its own, and you hit Collect.
That is the moment the whole template exists for. Your session pays you Coins and Cloud, and you are going to need both later.
You can only collect a session once, so no, you cannot farm the same two hours twice.
Every day has a goal
On top of the sessions, every day hands you a goal.
Sometimes it is a number of sessions. Sometimes it is total minutes. Sometimes it is one long session, which is the one that hurts. Eight hours of focus, or three sessions, or one deep block you cannot escape halfway through.
The goal picks itself based on the date, and the difficulty rotates between Easy, Medium, Hard and Beast. So hard days and easy days alternate, and it never just gets harder forever the longer you use it.
Hit it, claim it, get paid. Harder days pay more.
Your week, and your month
At the end of the week you get a report. Sessions, minutes, days focused, your longest session, your average length, your best day, and a comparison against last week so you know which direction you are moving.
The month gives you the same thing plus a focus mix by type, your highlights, the goals you won, and a grade.
An A means you focused on 85% of your days. B is 70%. C is 50%. D is 30%. Below that is an F, and you already know what an F feels like.
You stop guessing how your month went and you just look at it. A C is annoying enough to make you want a B.
Challenges and streaks
Challenges are the long game. They count across your whole history, not just today.
Some are about total sessions. Some are about total focus minutes. And some are milestones, like three sessions of 45 minutes or more, which forces you to go deep instead of collecting easy 25 minute wins.
Difficulty multiplies what you get. Easy pays once, Medium doubles it, Hard triples it, Epic pays five times. And if there is one you genuinely do not want to do, you can spend Ice to skip it and still get paid.
Then there is the streak, which is just days in a row with at least one collected session.
It drops to zero the moment you miss a full day. No grace period, no rounding up.
But if you missed exactly yesterday and you have not focused yet today, you can spend Ice to save it. It costs 5 Ice, plus one more for every 10 days of streak you are protecting. So the longer your streak gets, the more it costs to rescue, which is exactly how it should work.
Streak milestones pay out as you climb. Day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, then 7, 10, 14, 18, 21 and on.
What you are actually collecting
Every token here has one job, so you never have to think about what you are holding. Coins buy your rewards, Drops fill your water, Shell buys creatures, Cloud fills your badge, and Ice saves your streak.
That is it. And all of it feeds three collections.
20 flow stages
Flow is your water, and it climbs 20 stages. You start at Drop, then Dew, Mist, Drizzle, Rain, and it keeps going deeper from there until you reach the Lost Sea at the end.
Drops fill it. Get enough and you unlock the next stage, which pays you Shell.
Every stage has its own artwork, so the dashboard physically changes as you climb. You can watch the water get deeper.
100 creatures
Shell buys creatures for your Reef, but only once your water is deep enough to hold them.
You start microscopic. Tardigrade, Amoeba, Plankton. Then they grow into things like the Pink Axolotl and the Green Frog, and the deeper your water goes the stranger they get. There are 100 of them waiting down there.
This is my favourite part of the template. Your reef ends up being a diary of your focus hours. You look at it and you can see the work.
20 badges
Badges are your rank, and they tie everything together.
To unlock the next one you need enough Cloud and the full creature set attached to it. So sessions give you Cloud, Drops raise your water, water unlocks creatures, and creatures plus Cloud earn the rank.
You start as a Swimmer, then Snorkeler, Diver, Deckhand, Sailor, and it keeps climbing up to Admiral and past it.
This is the part that makes it a real game instead of a tracker. You cannot rush a badge by grinding one thing. You need the hours for the Cloud and you need the water deep enough for the creatures, so the only way through is to actually keep showing up.
Get all 20 badges, all 20 flow stages and all 100 creatures, and honestly, you are a beast.
There are two versions
The standalone one works completely on its own. If you use Notion, that is the one you want.
The second one is for people who already own SB7. It plugs into Game Mode, so your focus sessions feed your character directly. Your flow stages boost your XP, your creatures add power to your companion, and your streak wins send comets across. It comes with its own setup video.
Both are free.
Start today
It takes about five minutes. Duplicate the template, put your name on the dashboard, run one session, and collect it.
That first collect is when it clicks. You finish something hard and the system actually pays you for it, and the next session stops feeling like a wall you have to climb.
I made a full walkthrough of it on the channel if you want to see every page before you start.
