mindnotes

Inspiration

Feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and stressed are, unfortunately, common experiences. With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, struggles with mental health have significantly increased. According to a survey conducted by Statistics Canada from April 221-June 2021, 24.8% Canadians reported experience high levels of stress most days and 46.1% Canadians considered their stress levels were worse than prior to the pandemic.

While this is not a cure-all, one way to manage the stress is to organize the thoughts you are having, both those that are happy and those that are causing worry. By decluttering your mind, you can increase productivity, and ease anxiety, allowing you to then turn thoughts into action.

What it does

mindnotes is a tool that can be used to help you with your thought organization. Simply click to start a new note, type in your thoughts, list your action item and add more if necessary, jot down any useful notes or details, then click to add the note to the mindboard. As you’re in progress of working on, or once you’ve completed the action items, come back and reflect with the smiley face rating system - were they helpful? Using mindnotes, you can easily track your thoughts and be able to look back at what you found helpful when dealing with a stressful situation so that you can try those actions again if you encounter a similar situation.

How we built it

Mindnotes was developed with React for the front-end using the Material-UI library, and Express.js and MongoDB for the back-end.

Challenges we ran into

It was challenging to connect the front-end to the back-end server, to send the form data from the Adding a Sticky Note to be stored in the back-end to then be retrieved and displayed on the front end, because our team had no prior experience with this. We also had difficulty with sending and retrieving the rating system data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to build something in a short period of time, working together in a team. We’re also proud of completing and submitting a pitch video in time!

What we learned

We improved our skills and knowledge in React, how to use and implement a UI library, and how to connect the back & front end.

What's next for mindnotes

We kept the design of the application clean and simple so that you can stay focused on your thoughts, however, future improvements include adding the ability to drag and drop the notes to organize them physically within the board space, a feature to indicate the urgency of action items, and a tagging/sorting system to make it more efficient to search for specific or older notes.