Producktive
I built this at my first ever hackathon! PennApps Fall 2019. I had a blast learning all about technologies, meeting the coolest people ever, and eating all the free food.
Producktive is a duck-themed productivity chrome extension that keeps you on-task when online using very unique and one-of-a-kind methods. I built this with three peers who I had never met before: Shreya, Patrick, and Joe.
Overall, this was one of my first experiences of working on a fun side project and my first taste at hackathons. I absolutely loved the experience and just had SO much fun while building Productive.
Inspiration
We, as four college students, have admittedly succumbed to the allure of distracting entertainment sites far too many times. We set out to create a lighthearted productivity tool that could help people like us become more productive while online. Thus, Producktive was born.
What it does
Producktive is the world’s first duck-themed productivity tool. Simply, it is a chrome extension that tracks the sites that the user visits. Since Facebook, Reddit, and Youtube are some of the most distracting sites of today, Producktive will alert the user with a pop-up reminder to stay off those distracting sites and to be productive instead; in fact, users will not be able to scroll on the page at all, as the pop-up effectively blocks out all functionality on the site. In order to further incentivize the user to stay productive, Producktive will publically tweet the most recent tweet with the hashtag #duck onto the user’s Twitter page, which is apparently seen as “embarrassing”; it will also reply some random Twitter user with “Ducks are my best friends.”
Challenges we ran into
In creating Producktive, we ran into several unexpected technical bumps in the road. While coding the pop-ups, we initially had trouble making them interface with each other. In making Producktive a chrome extension, we ran into some challenges running node and using JS files. Lastly, we did not anticipate Twitter’s privacy policy by allowing Chrome to directly Tweet. However, we persevered through these challenges even improved upon our original ideas with them.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
We are quite proud of our pun in titling our hack Producktive and following through with the whole duck theme. Technically, we are pleased with the Twitter bot that we finally finished despite all of the error messages we had to debug to get to this point. Lastly, we are very excited about the small touches we eventually got to add on to our original ideas like the Producktivity timer.
What we learned
PennApps fall 2019 is three of our first ever hackathons and we took a lot away from the experience. Not only did we practice pulling all-nighters, we learned to solve technical problems that seem impossible to solve at the moment and to work together by utilizing each group member’s assets. Additionally, we are each leaving this hackathon with more knowledge on node.js, chrome extensions, Google cloud, and Twitter APIs.
What’s next for Producktive
While we love Producktive for who he is today, we only see a brighter future ahead. We have great plans for bettering Producktive. With more time and resources, we hope to add more user input: allowing the users to choose their own websites to block during their Producktive times. To improve our prevention algorithm, we plan to continue working with Google’s NLP to filter out certain posts or videos on social media. We would also love to create an account system and gamify the whole thing with more animations and quirks so that users can keep track of their long-term productivity habits, set timed weekly schedules, and have fun while doing it–for maximum producktivity ;)
Ashley is a CS+Econ student at Rutgers interested in the intersection between technology and business, climate change, and making the world a happier place.
