Hacking Life With Dayscore

Due to the Chinese National Holiday, my school closed last weekend. Usually, weekends are our busiest workdays so naturally Friday night we all went out to celebrate. In fact we celebrated a little too hard because I ended up waking up embarrassingly late into the afternoon the next day. Determined not to have an unproductive weekend, I built DayScore to help me stay on track.

DayScore is basically XBox achievements for your life. You simply add a list of things you’d like to accomplish each day: go to the gym, smoke zero cigarettes, answer all your emails etc. Then at the end of the day you go to DayScore and tick the things you accomplished. DayScore rewards you with satisfying graphs (ooh look at those trends!) and big green numbers when you accomplish your daily goals.

In designing DayScore I wanted to make the user experience as simple and quick as possible - so there’s no usernames or passwords - simply bookmark the unique link it redirects you to when you first visit the site. When you return, DayScore will remember you.

Inspiration for DayScore comes from a number of sources. Probably the biggest is Beeminder which I’m a big fan of and which is far more featureful (you can even pledge money as an incentive). However Beeminder seems more geared to achieving specific goals (eg weight-loss) than keeping consistant routines although there is some overlap.

Technology-wise, there were no limitations since it was a personal project so I went all out and ticked every buzzword. DayScore is running on Ruby on Rails, talking to MongoDB via Mongoid, hosted on Heroku, with a front-end made of JQuery written in Coffeescript.

It’s still ‘Beta’ so there may be a couple of bugs floating around - if you do have feedback or comments, I’d love to hear them.

edit: woo! featured on Lifehacker.com front page

edit: awesome - PC World magazine article