Gamified Productivity App

Overview

I wanted to know where my time online was actually going. The trackers I tried only showed me a number at the end of the week, which is too late to do anything about, and the blockers were too easy to switch off the moment they got in the way.

So I built Parrot Productivity, which does both, and put coins and XP on top so there is a reason to leave it on. It is a Chrome extension written in plain JavaScript, with no framework and no build step.

How It Works

It tracks whichever tab you are actually looking at and sorts the time by site into productive, distracting, or neutral. Your focus score is productive time over productive plus distracting. Neutral sites are left out, so reading documentation never counts against you.

Blocking only happens two ways, and you set both up in advance: a schedule you write yourself, and a task mode that allows only the sites you pick. The block page explains why it is there and can give you a timed override, unless strict mode is on. There is also a check-in that appears on distracting or unsorted sites, and on an unsorted one it asks you to categorize it, so the interruption teaches the extension something.

Staying at or above your focus goal earns a coin for every productive minute. Coins buy cases that drop cosmetics for a pixel-art mascot, 85 items across 9 slots. XP and streaks run alongside, with milestones at 7, 14, 30, and 60 days.

Where It's At

I use it daily. It is a personal project and not on the Chrome Web Store, and it still has rough edges: coins can drift out of sync across devices, and the daily data is never cleaned up.

The interesting part turned out not to be the features. It was keeping everything correct in something that can be shut down mid-write, on storage that has no way to do one thing at a time.