Efficiency Tracker
Efficiency tracker is a productivity app that aims to reduce procrastination at work time. It achieves so by visually showing how much time you spent working vs not working in the past few hours on a timeline. This information drives you to abstain from distractions such as YouTube and focus on the real work, in order to keep up your “efficiency”, or the percentage of time you work productively. You need to log in data manually. The app’s interface is designed to make this process as effortless and simple as possible.
The Quest
The quest of Efficiency Tracker all started with the questions that greatly troubles the group of people who are hysterical about their time: "Where did all my time go?" "How come I accomplish so little with so much time?"
Say you would like to spend the next hour finishing up an essay…
And you know it is what you are supposed to focus on…
But instead...
You spent 2 hours on social medias.
More often, you are not even conscious of it.
You have wasted more time than you think,
and there is not much to spare.
To many, wasting time is part of life and there is no point to find out how every minute is spent. But to others, every minute could be used to accomplish something great, and the fact that they waste time at work without knowing how is very troubling.
But what if you are able to retrace what you did and your productivity in the past few hours? For one of such people, the quest to gain insight from how their time is spent and to improve it triggered the design and development of this app, a tool to quantitatively record and plan your time at work.
The Inspiration
The idea of motivating someone to be more productive though displaying their work history is not completely new. The similar technique is already used by fitness tracker to motivate users to keep up with their workout by showing their workout history.
The real inspiration comes from an app called Time Bloc, which allows user to record how they spend their day with color-coded blocks marking their schedule. I use Time Bloc personally and find it motivating to spend time productively after seeing the history of your day activity. Knowing what you've accomplished drives you to accomplish more.
However, Time Bloc only lets you record what you did no more precise than 15-minutes blocks and does not convey details such as whether you have been actually scrolling through YouTube during a block you marked as "studying". It is a time recorder, not a planner. Efficiency Tracker is designed to fill such holes.
"Studying"
"Online Surfing"
"Shopping"
"Appointment"
"House Work"
"Commute"
The Vision
The design of the app started with a grand vision.
It shows the history of your work and productivity.
It schedules time for you to work.
It breaks down a complex task to simpler ones.
And it assigns tasks to a time for you to work on them.
Thus, not only are you motivated by the history of your accomplishments, you have a clear and reasonable goal of what to accomplish for every work session.
The Evolution
The project was intended to be developed beyond mere concept, and an elementary functional prototype implementing the most defining features was built on the IOS platform. Testing the prototype yielded valuable insights that drive the further improvement and addition of useful features, the history of which is documented in the following section.
NEW FINISH
PAUSE RESTART
The initial prototype has only the most essential functions to record work history: Starting a new task, pausing and restarting the task, and ending the task. You can also add notes to a part of the work history, like "bathroom break". The video demonstrates these functions.
RESET
Something I soon discovered is that it does not make much sense to tell the app to pause before you get distracted from work. Most time when you are distracted, you are not aware of it until after. This is why it would be nice to have a button that marks a period of time just elapsed as "unproductive" or "distracted" after you come back from YouTube land. Tap "reset" and enter the time you think you just skipped working. The app will mark it as a gray area on the timeline.
TAG
Though the app allows you to leave a note to describe a section of the work history, sometimes I want to leave a note at a precise point in time to describe my progress, such as "reading page 2". That's why I added a "tag" button. Tap on it and enter the note, and a tag containing the note will be left on this precise point on the timeline.
CHECKPOINT
I find myself working more productively if I set a time limit for a task. Soon I am urged to make a feature to facilitate this action. The checkpoint feature allows you to set a mini goal to be completed by a specific time(such as "within one hour") to keep you on track finishing the task on time. When the checkpoint arrives, the app alerts you through a notification. You can mark the checkpoint as complete, delay it further into the future, or abort it.
Completed checkpoint is marked in green color. A delayed checkpoint will be move to the future but also leave a "footprint" where it used to be. An aborted checkpoint is marked in red color.
Future Steps
Efficiency Tracker is still an incomplete project, and there are many things I would like to try given the reports from numerous field testings. One of them is the implementation of the "ink model", a model designed to visualize the goal of completing a set of tasks in time. Imagine each task is represented by a colored marker with limited amount of ink, which represent the time allocated to the task. The work session is represented by a blank sheet of paper. At any moment during the work session, the user can switch between two states, "pen up"(idle), and "pen down"(working), and choose the marker in hand(focused task). The goal is to complete the task before its ink(allocated time) runs out. The ink model intuitively presents to users the progress meeting their time sensitive goal and thus boosts productivity.
