Productivity Coin

Inspiration We wanted to gamify productivity — to reward people for staying focused and help them avoid distractions like social media. Inspired by the Pomodoro technique and self-tracking tools, we asked: What if browsing productive websites could earn you coins, and wasting time would cost you?

Productivity Coin is a browser-based productivity assistant:

Tracks which sites you visit
Analyzes if they're productive using AI
Updates your virtual wallet based on your activity (+10 to –10)
Blocks distracting sites when your wallet runs low
Integrates with your Google Tasks to suggest helpful things to do when you're "broke"
Lets you earn points back by completing tasks or through manual boosts
Frontend: Browser extension + Svelte frontend that sends browsing data
Backend: Node.js with Express, deployed on Render
Database: MySQL on AWS RDS
AI Analysis: GPT-3.5 to determine if a site is productive
Google Integration: Google OAuth to access user tasks
Authentication: Google Sign-In with our own app_token for secure API access
Deployment: Vercel + Railway

Challenges We had to figure out how to use Google OAuth in a way that supports long-term access to user data, refreshing access tokens when they expired (especially with Google Tasks, maaking sure the GPT API returned usable, clean JSON responses, managing tokens securely and efficiently across frontend and backen, and having to learn most of the stuff we used.

Accomplishments we're proud of We are proud to have created a working AI-powered productivity reward system from scratch, successfully integrated Google Tasks and GPT into one cohesive experience, built a complete login-to-action pipeline with token refresh and dynamic wallet logic, and having hit a good chunk of our goals. What we learned

How to build a full OAuth2 flow (including refresh tokens)
How to use OpenAI’s API for real-time decision making
How to think like a product designer — balancing user experience with accountability
That sometimes "blocking Instagram" is the best productivity feature of all

What’s next for Productivity Coin