Contxt.link: Make multi-tasking suck less
Contxt.link: Make multi-tasking suck less

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Contxt is a chrome extension and web-app that allows you to resume your flow state by letting your save your tabs and notes for later.

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Concept

Everyone has their own idea for the perfect productivity app™️, and I'm no different. We're all just chasing that sweet, sweet flow state - a nirvana for productivity and creation.

They say God created the Earth in 7 days, but it could've been done in 5 if the daily standup didn't interrupt their flow.

My ideal productivity app is one that doesn't rely on organizing your tasks and when to do them, it's one that just allows you to just do. I wanted to treat projects as ongoing threads where tasks get added as you complete them, not as you're planning the project. I didn't need to plan what my next week or month of work looked like. I was only concerned about the next hour.

Development

Contxt was build initially using

AWS Amplify⁠

, which provides API, Auth, and Hosting as a service, along with a client-side library to interact with it. Despite the magically quick deployment of cloud resources, I ran into numerous gotchas with Cognito, which is the AWS Auth service. Cognito was unable to pass the auth token back to a chrome extension, which would've forced my to handle auth in the webapp and store credentials in local storage.

Desperately searching for answers, I stumbled across this repo:

firebase/quickstart-js⁠

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Was it worth switching to Firebase just to solve this one issue? The answer was

YES, $@!%&^ ABSOLUTELY IT IS

The Firestore, auth, and hosting worked like a charm, right out of the box. I was able to migrate my app to Firebase in just a few hours and never looked back. The CLI, dashboard, and documentation were simple and easy to use. The Firestore DB allows you to store documents (think one big file-tree) instead of having to define a schema and perform DB migrations like you would with a relational database. This makes getting started ridiculously easy, but I can see why it'd lead to scaling issues in the future.

Next steps

If this workflow resonates with you, you can download

Adept⁠

, which is a much sleeker version of what I tried to build. I had great conversations with the creator, Grant Marvin, about his ideas for productivity as he fiddled around with building a Superhuman for Task management. Normally I'd think that's a weak product analogy, but considering that Grant worked at Superhuman, I was excited to hear his ideas on designing a better flowstate.

If I were to take Contxt further, I'd build an Asana integration and then start focusing on gamification. What if work felt like a video game with intermittent goals, side quests, and rewards? The next generations will grow up on video games and digital experiences, so I'm betting that UI for work tools will become more visually stimulating and video-gamey to make work feel less like work.

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