ChaiTime
The rhythm and culture of office breaks without the office.
Remote workers, especially those adjusting to asynchronous cultures, struggle to self-regulate their work and break times. Especially without shared office cues, remote workers find it hard to build or break routines. This often causes them to overwork or take unplanned breaks, leading to tiredness, disconnection, and burnout.
Opportunity
In physical offices, structure is built in via fixed schedules, hallway chats, coffee breaks. Remote workers, especially early career ones, must self-regulate everything, from logging in to logging off.
Solution
A digital solution that helps remote workers regulate their productivity levels by helping them take guilt-free breaks and helping them unplug at the end of the day.
Methods
Literature Review, User Interviews, Behavioral Models
Tools
Figma, Figjam, Adobe Illustrator, Lovable.dev
My Role
UX Designer & Researcher
Why is this problem important?
Remote Work Is Here to Stay
Even five years after the pandemic, remote work continues to be a core part of workplace culture. Over 50% of companies report no plans to return to a fully in-office model in the near future.
But...
Is it a curse or a boon?
Buffers Remote Work Survey reveals statistics that show that despite having a lot of perks, a large share of the workers are unhappy. A 2-year study by Great Place to Work found remote workers are highly productive, but also work longer hours and struggle to unplug.
93%
Workers said work-life boundaries are important to them but half of them struggled to maintain them.
1 in 5
Remote Workers felt burnt out.
Resulting in companies investing more and more in employee wellness programs
According to Splashtop companies are introducing wellness initiatives like flexible hours, mental health support, and tools that encourage breaks, but few target long-term behavior change.
Increase in Remote Hires
Decrease in mental health of these remote workers
Increase in companies investing in wellness initiatives for remote workers
What are the challenges they faced and what
I learned from them?
Who did I ask?
10 Early Career Remote Tech Workers
Why them?
Routines are still forming, making them more open to adopting new habits and tools. Actively experiencing the challenges of remote work, offering fresh and relevant insights.
What did I ask them?
What daily challenges early-career remote workers face in navigating remote work. How factors like isolation, lack of structure, or unclear boundaries affect their behavior and mindset. What underlying causes or patterns contribute to these challenges—from environment to self-regulation.
01
Time Blindness
Interviewees struggled to define their own workday.
Without clear boundaries or cues, work often bled into personal hours, making it hard to disengage.
02
Social Isolation
Especially among early-career professionals, many hadn’t met colleagues in person.
This made collaboration, mentorship, and connection feel transactional or distant.
03
Sedentary Lifestyle
With everything accessible at home, many admitted to going days without leaving the house.
This led to feelings of stagnation, physical fatigue, and dips in motivation.
As I began analyzing recurring patterns from my interviews, like time blindness, guilt around breaks, and reliance on social cues, I realized that the problem wasn’t just logistical, but deeply behavioral.
I started researching frameworks that could help unpack these dynamics and came across Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) by Albert Bandura. SCT stood out because it frames human behavior as a dynamic interaction between personal traits, environmental influences, and behavioral patterns, exactly what I was seeing in my data. It offered the clarity I needed to understand not just what users were doing, but why they were doing it, and helped shape a solution that addressed all three dimensions. For example, A worker may want to take a break (personal), but keeps working because no one else is offline (environmental), and they’ve developed a pattern of skipping breaks (behavioral).
From this process two dominant archetype of personas emerged, representing different coping mechanisms and behavioral tendencies within remote work.
MEET JACK & JILL
WHO
PERSONALITY
BEHAVIOUR
ENVIRONMENT
OUTCOME
JILL
JACK
She’s motivated and confident about managing her time.
He values productivity, but finds it hard to set boundaries or stop working, feels afraid to speak up in meetings due to unfamiliarity with colleagues.
She uses small rituals to switch off from work, like closing her laptop, going for a walk or journaling.
He freestyles his breaks and sometimes zones out not realizing how much time has passed.
She changes up her workspace, sometimes working from cafés or other co-working spaces.
He stays at home all day, which makes it harder to feel a sense of change or pause.
She still gets tired, but knows how to manage it and protect her energy.
He ends up feeling guilty for resting and risks burnout or feeling isolated
Clearly, all work & no play makes Jack a dull boy.
So how do I as a designer help remote workers like Jack regulate their break time so they can establish clear boundaries between work and rest, combat a sedentary lifestyle, and protect their long-term health?
Calm App
Whoop
Headspace
IDENTIFYING THE GAPS
To better understand the gaps in existing solutions, I analyzed popular tools users were already using. I focused on which features they found helpful and where those tools fell short in addressing their current challenges.
Most tools focus on recovery after stress, not on guiding users in the moment and provide structure. They don’t help remote workers recognize when to pause or support them in doing so during their workday.
These tools operate in isolation from users' daily routines and work environments. They don’t integrate into workflows or reflect the social and environmental cues that influence real-world behavior.
Tools like Calm, Headspace, and Whoop show that users respond well to calming rituals, visual progress and light gamification.
Ideation Stage
Through primary research, I uncovered that early-career remote workers like Jack struggled not just with time management, but with deeper behavioral challenges—unclear routines, emotional guilt, and a lack of social or environmental cues. Applying Social Cognitive Theory helped me understand how these behaviors were shaped by personal factors, actions, and a disconnected work environment. Meanwhile, competitive analysis revealed that while existing wellness tools support reflection and recovery, they lack real-time guidance and workplace integration. These insights shaped the foundation for my ideation: designing a solution that supports in-the-moment behavior change, blends seamlessly into the workday, and restores the rhythm remote work has lost.
Desktop Pets
Third Space
Pause Pal
CONCEPT TESTING
To validate the concept (not the visuals) I created a quick prototype using vibe-coding on Lovable.dev. This allowed me to test the core idea and features early on, before investing in design details. Here’s what I learned from it.
Privacy: Users were uncomfortable sharing personal stats or break scores with their team.
Social Pressure: Freshers felt obligated to join if invited to a break room by a colleague, making breaks feel less optional.
Flexibility: Users questioned scenarios where they didn’t want to take a break or postpone
a break.
BRAINSTORMING FEATURES
To solidify the concept and user flow, I began brainstorming features that would make the solution feel like more than just a glorified alarm system. I also wanted to recreate the subtle structure that an office environment naturally provides.
While reflecting on my own experience, I realized that one of the most universally accepted reasons to take a break at work was to grab a coffee or tea with coworkers. It offered a spontaneous yet socially reinforced pause—guilt-free, mentally refreshing, and often the highlight of the day. That moment of shared ritual sparked the idea for ChaiTime..
Introducing ChaiTime
ChaiTime is a desktop app that helps you take regular breaks to disrupt the monotony of the work day and unplug intentionally, one sip at a time.
Enjoy chai breaks with your colleagues from the comfort of your own house...
ChaiTime isn’t just a break timer, it’s a behavioral support system designed to help remote workers rebuild the rhythm lost in remote work. Inspired by the informal rituals of office tea breaks, it blends visual metaphor, gentle nudges, and end-of-day closure into a simple, habitual experience.
The user flow is intentionally minimal and intuitive, supporting the user’s autonomy while gently nudging healthier behavior. Each step maps directly to Social Cognitive Theory (SCT)—targeting personal, behavioral, and environmental influences on remote work habits.
Preserving Autonomy
Users customize their break intervals, durations, and snooze preferences. Calendar sync helps identify natural pause points.
Why it matters?
Recognizing that every user works differently, ChaiTime allows individuals to tailor their break rhythm to match their real-life schedule.
Personal Factor: Empowers users with control, reducing guilt and resistance.
Environmental Factor: Brings subtle structure to the day by aligning with existing commitments.
Preserving Autonomy
To address concerns around flexibility and timing, the solution now includes options to snooze or skip breaks, putting users fully in charge of their rhythm.
Gentle Habit Formation
Users in testing expressed discomfort with being tracked or compared. ChaiTime supports habit-building without pressure, offering a quiet sense of accomplishment as their cup fills with each successful break.
Intentional Breaks
Break mode dims the screen and activates a calming tea-fill animation as a timer. This can also act as a cue to rest their eyes as prolonged staring at a screen can also be harmful
Behavioral Factor
Reinforces the habit of stepping away with a clear start and end point.
Environmental Factor
The ambient change in screen state acts as a gentle cue to rest.
Reintroducing Social Rhythm
In remote settings, casual team moments are rare. Letting users see who’s on a break and share light progress helps recreate that informal connection without the pressure.
Closing the loop
Behavioral Factor: Reinforces consistent break-taking by tying it to a positive end-of-day reward.
Personal Factor: Shifts mindset from “rest is lost time” to “rest is productive.”
Closing the Loop
Remote workers often struggle to log off. This final ritual encourages a soft stop and celebrates consistent self-care.
CHAI-TIME HABIT LOOP
A habit loop is a behavioral model introduced by Charles Duhigg (2012) that explains how habits form and stick. It consists of three core components:
Cue: the trigger that initiates a behavior
Routine: the behavior itself
Reward: the benefit or feedback that reinforces the habit
Over time, this loop becomes automatic, building routines that require less conscious effort and willpower.
FUTURE SCOPE
ChaiTime was designed as a foundation for mindful, ritual-based rest in remote work settings. While the current version focuses on habit formation through gentle cues and individual customization, there are several directions to expand and deepen its impact:
DEEPER PERSONALIZATION
Adapt break intervals and durations based on mood check-ins, time-of-day behavior, or contextual signals like screen activity.
CROSS TOOL ECOSYSTEM
Integrate ChaiTime with tools like Slack, Notion, or Google Calendar to let users embed breaks into their workflow naturally without context switching.
BIOFEEDBACK INTEGRATION
Incorporate data from wearables to trigger smart break nudges when signs of stress are detected making the system even more responsive.
BIOFEEDBACK INTEGRATION
Incorporate data from wearables to trigger smart break nudges when signs of strain or fatigue are detected making the system even more responsive.