ClockWork

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Inspiration

For all their perks, College campuses and workplaces can often be insulating and isolating places. When times get tough, we know from experience how hard it can be to get work done. We were inspired by the psychology of scheduling and location to create an agenda app that rewards you for completing your tasks in a timely manner at an ideal location. While we recognize that the productivity space is full of brilliant ideas, we are confident that our rewards system offers a genuine improvement on existing solutions.

What it does

While ClockWork is still very deep in the development process, we envision ClockWork as every day’s first step towards productivity. By starting your day with a goal, a task list, and a set of obligations, we provide a daily agenda that ensures you have the opportunity to maximize your productivity. As you check in throughout the day, you are rewarded with a certain amount of points depending on how close you were to completing your goal on time and whether or not you completed the task outside of your identified living space. At the end of the day, your points are added to your long-term total, providing you with a sense of genuine accomplishment.

How we built it

We used Expo React Native with vanilla CSS on the frontend and Firebase as the backend. We chose React Native because of its status as the industry standard of native app development. Because we had limited experience with both of our technologies, we chose Firebase as a powerful but easy-to-use backend platform to shorten development time. We primarily used Firebase for the User Authentication and Firestore NoSQL database. During the development process, we relied on Figma and Github to manage our creative and collaborative workflows.

Challenges we ran into

In contrast to our COSC 101 assignments based on fundamentals of Python, treading right into full-stack development was daunting at first. Thanks to the help of several YouTube tutorials, firebase’s robust documentation, and the very patient advice of Isabel, and the logistical support from the DandyHacks team, we were able to make a significant amount of progress on a working demo. Still, due to a fairly steep learning curve and time constraints, we were unable to realize our geospatial tracking mechanism and only partially realized our desired user experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An effective collaborative workflow that allowed 4 absolute beginners to create a full-stack React Native mobile app. We dug our heels in to learn a lot and we did it as a team.

What we learned

On the technical side, We learned a lot about Figma, Github, React Native, CSS, and Firebase. We also learned about the integration between frontend and backend stack development as integrated for a mobile app. But more than just an introduction to new technologies, we learned that the shared tenacity of a passionate team is able to push each of us much further than we could have walked alone. Identifying individual strengths and learning to develop and communicate in a team environment while honing our technical skills provided an in-depth learning experience beyond anything we’ve experienced in a classroom. As a holistic learning opportunity, this project also encouraged us to take on more projects of our own in the future.

What's next for ClockWork

Going forward, we hope to fully realize our geospatial tracking while improving our reward system to more effectively motivate our users. We also hope to integrate a real-time notification system to nudge our users to at strategic times during the workday, for e.g. when there is a break of 30 minutes or longer since their scheduled task completion and there are no outstanding commitments.