Inspiration
The inspiration comes from the app 'focus to-do' and from the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. This app and book helped me learn how to do focus work, which has greatly contributed to get me to the point I'm at in my academic career. With the advent of LLMs, My former partner and I wanted to create next gen tools to help us organize our busy lives and focus on our school work.
What it does
It's a todo list with a chatbot that recommends subtasks, which the subtasks can be filtered to get back subtasks of a specific category. This tools is great for endeavors that require me to break what I to do into tasks and subtasks, In my case as a college student, I use it most typically for open ended assignments where teacher doesn't layout step by step how to complete it or when I need to study for a test or quiz. And this tool is great for when I don't want to spend overhead time making detailed tasks with subtasks, but still want a detailed tasks and subtasks to help me focus and set goals by splitting up work into digestible portions.
How we built it
Built a full stack web app
Challenges we ran into
For responses for the open ai api, Getting the right output in the right json format without hallucinations and constraining the tokens (response length) from the ai. Trying to figure out how to use rest api, but ending up scrapping it. Generating ideas as a team of 2, but in the end the teammate left the group, so it was just me developing the app. Deciding when to update page using Django templates or java script.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Creating a tool that I actually use that provides value to my workflow.
What we learned
How to structure a full stack development process. How to use APIs. How to get more people interested into helping me develop the app and what goes into handling team dynamics. How to balance a hackathon during the school semester.
What's next for Depnow
The goal of Depnow is bigger than just this hackathon project. I want Depnow to let a student or any other person be more consistent, effective, and focused when doing focused work by letting the them be able to easily track their hours focused on a task or subtask. I want this coupled with tools like an 'after focus session reflection' and an integrated third party digital calendar, which would be all wrapped together by AI to gather insights about what methods help the user be the most focused. I believe this could become a great tool for combatting our age of distraction.
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