Inspiration
Current productivity apps lack enjoyment. We want to add a sense of fun to staying productive, enabling the user to take control of their time. This allows more motivation to be productive, nudging them to a more well-balanced, healthier life. As Greggor would say, a healthy person is the most productive.
What it does
Our application has the ability to create tasks in various categories. For each task, work periods can be added to log each period of time spent working on that project. Points are then awarded, incentivising the user to keep working towards their tasks. For each category, there is a maximum number of points that can be gained, encouraging them to maintain balance in their life e.g. spending more time being productive towards the hobbies category when the school category has been maximised.
These points allow the user to increase their level, allowing them to unlock new forms of Greggor, mascot, which can be set to their profile picture. Each level also accompanies the user unlocking a new part of the provided story, encouraging them to stay productive by helping Greggor. This journey is visualised by a map and provides a greater sense of achievement to being productive.
The user can also see graphs and statistics on the summary page, allowing them to be more aware of how they are spending their time. This allows them to identify where positive changes can be made, improving how they spend their time.
How we built it
This application is built using a blend of Django on the backend, with HTML and CSS in the frontend. Our roadmap to development started with brainstorming ideas, especially towards giving the user control of their life and providing them motivation to be productive, followed by designing a database that align with these. We then proceeded with an iterative approach, splitting our priorities between mostly backend and mostly frontend development, developing small components of the application at a time.
With the base task management application done, we made use of data to create user personalised visualisations and provide statistics to enable users to get a better understanding of how they work. Finally, we moved onto our gamification design, and deciding how to best implement the use of the point system, proceeding forward with sharing the story of Greggor.
Challenges we ran into
As a part of our motivational system, a balance had to be struck in order to ensure sustainable hits of motivation to keep users going, while incentivising a well balanced life, and discouraging trying to game the system. We got through this by firstly limiting how many points can be achieved per week for a given category, to ensure that users aren't sticking to one type of task. Secondly, we added bonus points for completing tasks, using their time taken in comparison to how long they thought the task would take, which get taken away if a task is later set to incomplete after completed, to keep users from continuously going back to old tasks. Finally we made use of the time taken to encourage keeping to a task, which when paired to the previous point, incentives users to procrastinate less and use their time more effectively.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
In the span of 24 hrs, we've built a fully task managing application, but more than that, we've built a space for people to learn more about how they spend their time without much effort, and a budding community around Greggor and his stories that push us forward, starting with us.
What we learned
Teamwork is the dreamwork. More than just technically, bouncing ideas off of one another amongst great minds is how most great ideas are brought to life.
What's next for Greggor Productivity Companion
We are an ever expanding service and will continue to spread the tales of Greggor, providing motivation and enthusiasm back to people's lives. To extend our current product, new stories and levels will be added to provide more fun each month. Greggor believes that you should be in control of your life, and so we're going to continue helping him by expanding our set of visualisations so that you know how you're spending your time, and if it aligns with your goals.
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