Verdant

Inspiration

Focus is a fragile asset, one that we found ourselves losing much too often. We wanted to create a program that rewards us for being productive by rewarding us when we do so, and by losing progress when we don't. We wanted to create something that does not block one from accessing websites, but rather encourages productive habits through positive and negative reinforcement. The idea of a forest that thrives when you focus and burns when you don’t strikes us as a powerful metaphor for attention. We decided to make Verdant, a tool that turns your focus into an ecosystem, helping users see their productivity grow and feel the impact of distraction in real time.

What it does

Verdant is a browser extension and web dashboard that gamifies focused work. When you begin a focus session, seeds are planted in a virtual forest. You are able to grow your trees by staying focused and on task. If you get distracted, a wildfire will begin and spread rapidly across your forest, conveying the cost of losing focus in a visual way. When you return to your task, the fire slowly goes out, and your forest begins to recover and regrow. Your session, stats, and forest state persist even if you close or restart your browser, turning your productivity into a continuously evolving landscape.

How we built it

To build Verdant, we separated into a frontend team and a backend team. While Rishab built the landing page and added all of the assets, Sahaj and Max focused on creating a backend that logged websites, time spent on websites, tab switches, and more. Then, the backend team focused on training an algorithm to properly adjust the focus score as well as the forest state (growing vs burning) by implementing an LLM to analyze the data collected by the Chrome extension and turn it into modifiers that incrementally adjust the focus score and the ecosystem state, as well as provide feedback to the user. Because we worked on separate teams, we developed the backend and frontend separately and then merged them after both sides had worked independently. We spent the remainder of our time debugging and finding ways to improve the user experience.

Challenges we ran into

Although most of the project was smooth, we ran into a couple of problems. It wasn't easy to integrate the frontend with the backend while making both the extension and the dashboard look appealing while also being functional. We overcame this challenge by refining the CSS that was created in the front to work with the backend. We also faced difficulties making the frontend look good, and we overcame those difficulties by

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the project as a whole, but we are specifically proud of the extension. Because it was our first time building a Chrome extension, we ran into many hurdles, and we are proud of overcoming those hurdles. We are proud of both our idea and the implementation of it because it was both challenging and fun at the same time.

What we learned

We learned and effectively put to use our knowledge of implementing a website and an extension to create a powerful app. Specifically, we learned all the different steps to creating and launching a Chrome extension, how to make a new tab landing page, how to implement a search engine into our own site, how to integrate a front-end website into a Chrome extension, and various other related insights.

What's next for Verdant

In the future, we plan to expand Verdant as a gamified tool in a productivity system. We plan on allowing players to explore multiple biomes, create seasonal events, and add an AI that adapts based on user behavior over time. We also want to introduce record dashboards and friendly competition, allowing friends or teams to make something as mundane as productivity into a game. In the far future, we want to explore the possibility of cross-device syncing, letting users seamlessly integrate Verdant into all of their devices. Furthermore, we would like to integrate habit analytics, focus streaks, and long-term forests that track your productivity over months and even years. Ultimately, we hope to make Verdant a reminder to everyone that productivity leads to growth beyond imagination.