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Welcome to the 1F427_Productivity wiki!
In a world of increasing institutional, governmental and social metrics, we don’t need another one—or do we? Productivity is extremely difficult to track. Can we really measure it in lines of code, miles run or words written? What about analysis, thought and revision? What about discussion? How does “work done” really relate to “productivity”? And how does all this “work” affect us as human beings?
🐧 Productivity is a new take on the to-do app. Rather than provide you with cruel metrics that quantify you as the sum of your outputs, 🐧 Productivity provides a relaxed, slightly unhinged way of reflecting on daily activities and how they affect your emotional state—without the pressure or privacy concerns of social media; to congratulate successes and take not so happy moments in irreverent stride.
Because the application is highly customizable, it provides not only a ready-made means of tracking your day, but a container for injecting your own sense of humour, or pedantic timekeeping, into the choice of emojis and quantifiers through human-readable update formats
This projected followed best practice in its choice of an open source code repository and the inclusion of relevant documentation for installation, use and modification as well as the inclusion of open, stable dependencies for building the web application. We have also included a software citation file to encourage fair attribution to all team members.
The demo provides all the initially proposed features.
All of our code, the backend and web interface, is available on a github repository with a MIT license, using the open source and widely available dependencies Django and Bootstrap.
The repository contains a README and installation script as well as the usage information included in this wiki.
We are excited about the future potential of this application. Although the web interface is not directly translated into mobile development, the design principles and underlying code should lead to a straightforward port in the future.
It is hoped that the next stage of the project will allow for an on-the-go mobile app that allows academics to regain a bit of their humanity and work-life balance and a much needed escape from more career-focused metrics. Although it is "a bit of fun", regularly challenging your conceptions about what productivity means, and what types of activities we really enjoy and when, is vital to our continuing mental health.
Although Melodee initially proposed the project, this was truly a collaborative design and implementation project. All members of the team contributed to the design, code and interface of the application, building upon our backgrounds in HTML/CSS, Python, Django and graphic design. In particular, James Graham and Matt Williams acted as Django Gurus, calmly training us in the mystic ways of models and fixtures as we built up the database and web interface.
We began the day by identifying all major tasks to be undertaken and discussing which could be done in parallel and which in sequence before pairs or individuals volunteered to tackle them. We utilised Github wikis for constant documentation and issues to signal our current work and when it was complete. Morale was boosted by using the "paper version" of our app to record our tasks with emojis as we went along as well as a supply of healthy and delicious snacks.
We also made vocal calls when pushing new features, to let everyone in the room know if they should pull new versions. As the day progressed, individuals volunteered to take on next steps, often in different areas (database filling, coding, web interface, graphic design) than they had been working on previously.