Rush Hour

Rush Hour started with something we kept noticing: people would sit down intending to work, pick up their phone for a minute, and somehow end up scrolling for an hour. We wanted to understand why it was so easy to lose focus, so we spoke to people about how they actually work, what distracts them, and what makes them feel like they had a productive day.

We realised that another timer wasn't going to solve it. Instead of telling you how long you worked, what if you could actually see it? That became Rush Hour — a productivity app that records your work session and turns it into a time-lapse of the time you actually spent working.

You start a session, put your phone down, and work. When you're done, you have a time-lapse showing the whole session. You can keep your sessions as a personal record or share one as an Instagram story — "I actually spent 4 hours working on this today." The idea was to make focused work something you could see, remember, and even share.

My role was putting the core system together and figuring out how the recording experience should work. I designed the underlying architecture and built the recording logic using AVFoundation, including capturing the session and turning hours of footage into a lightweight time-lapse rather than keeping the full recording.

Rush Hour became less about counting hours and more about making your time visible. Instead of another notification telling you to focus, the app gives you something at the end that shows whether you actually did.