Introducing Daysier: Personalised Productivity Solutions
A new startup developing recommender systems based productivity dashboards to make your day easier
Recently, myself and another PhD student took part in the NovaUCD student enterprise competition at University College Dublin. This was a 4-week programme that helped us develop our entrepreneurial and innovation skills while working on a startup of our own.
During that time we developed Daysier.
Being PhD students, we are both very into productivity: the more productive we are, the sooner we will be finished our PhDs. Our workdays are very flexible — we decide what we will be doing on a given day, when to start and end the workday as well as when to take breaks. Nowadays (especially with so many working from home at the moment) there are many people working with flexible schedules.
While flexibility is great, it can have some problems. Some people will struggle to get started with the day or stay focussed, while others will be unable to maintain work-life balance and end up overworked. Below are the results from polls of over 100 remote workers on Instagram:
67% found it difficult to stay productive/motivated
42% struggled with planning the workday
71% failed to separate work and home life
The problem with currently available productivity tools is that they are not personalised even though 93% of people we surveyed on Instagram felt that productivity tools should be personalised.
Additionally, most productivity apps focus on solving one workday-related problem. This means we end up having a ton of different apps for a ton of different things, and lose productivity switching between all of these apps. We are instead offering a one-stop solution for all of the tools you need, all in the one place.
How Daysier Works
1. Take the Quiz
A short quiz so Daysier can learn what aspects of the workday you would like to improve, and what specific difficulties you are having.
2. Get Your Custom Dashboard
Based on your answers to the quiz, Daysier will generate some recommended productivity tools that will be automatically fitted into a custom dashboard.
From there you can further customise the design, as well as add in other tools that you want to try out.
3. Get Better Recommendations
Daysier is a smart tool: the more you use your dashboard, the more we can get to know what works for you and what hinders you.
Over time, Daysier will start to make highly custom recommendations such as:
When you use the pomodoro timer, you get your tasks done 45% faster.
When you scroll social media in the morning, the first two hours of your day are 24% less productive.
Users who also struggle with switching off from work, have been finding the shutdown routine builder helpful.
Current and Future Development
Daysier is an early stage venture, but we expect to launch the dashboards in September. We are currently linking up the front and back-end and working on the underlying recommendation algorithms.
In terms of funding, we placed third at the NovaUCD student enterprise competition, generating a €2,000 investment. Being PhD students in machine learning, and having experience with UX design we have the technical expertise to build this product, and the main overhead is our personal time.
At the moment, you can demo the initial quiz on daysier.co (which will be extended at a later date), get some recommended productivity tools and sign up to be notified when the custom dashboards are ready.
Build a chain of productivity, with Daysier.
