Inspiration
Time management and self improvement are universally difficult. This is especially the case during the pandemic, when the need to purposefully maintain and take care of our mental health has become more important than ever. While there is an ocean of advice on the topic, there is no one-size-fits-all system that works for everyone. Regardless, we decided to try and create a tool that will help users implement some of the strategies that have helped us during the past several months.
What it does
This mobile app borrows much of the structure of the Theme System Journal designed by CGP Grey, but leverages some of the inherent benefits of a phone app(eg. using notifications to promote more consistent practice). The main idea is to structure your personal goals for a year or a longer period of time around a common theme. Being reminded of the theme serves as a soft guide that can advise which decisions you should make without being so strict that you feel bad for falling behind on your goals. In addition, the app recommends a couple daily practices. The first is that every morning, the user should determine one task that, if accomplished, they could consider that day to be a "good" day. Not only is this an exercise in prioritization, but also tricks the users' brains into focusing more on what they may have gotten done that day rather than the backlog of work that always seems to pile ever higher. The second is to do some gratitude journaling at the end of the day. The trick is to get the user to be specific about what they're grateful for by classifying each point into different categories. Additionally, saving the activity for the end of the day means that your brain has to really dwell on those topics for longer, and remember the good things that happened in a day for longer.
How we built it
We used React-Native to design our app, because it allows us to work on both Android and iOS. We store user information using Firebase in the backend.
Challenges we ran into
None of us knew how to use React-Native before starting this project! There was a decent learning curve, and our inexperience definitely slowed down our debugging throughout the project. In addition, we had learned the hard way that Firebase and React-Native have both gone through many updates in the recent past that changed the way they should be implemented in an app. We had scrambled around for a time following instructions from outdated guides.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Being able to climb over that learning curve despite having limited front-end experience and make as much as we did is a huge accomplishment.
What we learned
Through our research on various front-end frameworks, we learned a lot about the different kinds of applications and their advantages and disadvantages. There was also a noticeable improvement in our ability to intuit good front-end code structure between when we started and when we finished. We learned a lot about asynchronous code operation, including much about the life cycle of components in the front end, and faced many challenges regarding rendering components based on asynchronous values.
What's next for Digital Theme System Journal
There are other UI pages that we wish to add in the future, such as a goal progress tracker where the user can mark their progress towards their long-term goals. We also want to store and retrieve goal history to allow the user to past trends in their behavior. In addition, we will send timely notifications to the user reminding them to fill out their goals and gratitude reflections every morning and evening.
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