Inspiration
A daily challenge everyone faces involves trying to do work but being easily distracted for extended periods of time. How often do you sit down to start writing an essay, but end up spending 3 hours on TikTok without realising? This is an issue we wanted to tackle
What it does
This chrome extension tracks your activity on a google doc, tracking your productivity and analysing data received to determine whether you have been distracted or not. It then sends you a notification to remind you to continue working :)
How we built it
The chrome extension consists of a manifest file, and normal html, css and javascript. Some unique features involve needing to have a background.js file to store information while running the extension without worrying about losing important information.
Another important aspect of this project was using the google developer API to be able to GET key features from a google doc, including word count (which was our main method of tracking productivity).
We also had to use node.js and axios to build our own API that connects the google doc API to our extension.
Challenges we ran into
On top of having limited web development experience, none of us had experience working with extensions. So this project was truly a challenge. Going into it, we never expected to have to make our own API just to connect the google doc API to our front end. Additionally, we were exposed to many new concepts relating to web development, including promises and callback functions.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Being able to have a chrome extension that has many working features, and being able to adapt and learn as we make progress and in the project and uncover new challenges.
What we learned
We learned the importance of teamwork, organisation and communication to be able to achieve such a feat in a very short period of time. Additionally, we learned that reaching out for help is essential to learning, as the mentors were a crucial part of our experience
What's next for EfficientFuel
Graphs, reports, checklists, calendars, pomodoro clocks.... the list of additional features to add goes on. In particular, we want to implement a feature where data of your productivity is stored on a database, and we want to provide visual daily/weekly/monthly reports of your productivity, to help users see trends and reflect on their progress.
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