Slice

Inspiration

Given the current pandemic, many have switched to working from home, and a common feeling is that it's easier to be distracted in this new work environment. There's the constant temptation of wanting to check Facebook, browse Reddit, or watch a quick YouTube video. Our productivity tool provides a clean and easy solution!

What it does

Slice enables users to set time limits for how long they can spend on unproductive sites (ie. YouTube, Facebook). Once the time limit has been reached, users get a notification from chrome reminding them that they have reached their quota of "distractedness". Aside from the notifications, the extension also provides a settings page where users can choose which sites go on their "distraction blacklist", and how long the limits for those sites should be, as well as an analytics page that provides users with data insights on their productivity/time usage habits.

How we built it

Whenever a new chrome tab is opened, a timer is created, and a function runs periodically to update data and check whether the user has exceeded their allotted time limit, and notify if yes.

Challenges we ran into

There were a lot of challenges we ran into along the way, including figuring out how chrome extensions worked and navigating the API, investigating gnarly bugs, etc.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having the tool work from end to end, from being able to set time limits and customize the blacklist of sites, to receiving notifications when we spend enough time on those sites, to seeing the data displayed in our graphs!

What we learned

How to build a chrome extension from scratch! Also, none of our team members were very familiar with HTML/CSS/JS before this, so we learned a lot about those as well.

What's next for Slice

Add to our collection of graphs to provide users with more insights.

Built With

• bootstrap
• chrome
• css3
• extension
• html5
• javascript