Momentum

Inspiration

My inspiration for this project was to help those around me, and myself included, who suffer from ADHD and ADD. After COVID, it's been hard remembering how to balance all the complex aspects of life. This combined with ADHD can prove to make completing tasks quite difficult.

I have a friend who failed multiple classes last term due to the difficulties of trying to figure out how to get stuff marked off of his to-do list.

What it does

Momentum aims to provide a solution for any student who wants to get more done by helping them break down, keep track of, and schedule tasks and projects so they can do more while stressing less.

The "My Tasks" screen will display all the unfinished tasks you have to complete as cards that you can expand. Each card will open their own screen to display finished and unfinished subtasks, and a progress bar to help visualize how much there is left to do.

How we built it

Momentum was designed in Figma, and created using t3 to set up a full-stack React website with TypeScript and Tailwind. A Prisma schema will be used to connect to a Planetscale database that will hold user information, task information, and subtask information in a relational database model.

Additionally, the Google API will be used to connect to a users Google Calendar allowing them to sync the Momentum created schedule with their other events. This will ensure conflicts don't occur, and the user can receive notifications to help keep them on task.

Challenges we ran into

During the creation of Momentum, I've run into many problems as I'm not very experienced when it comes to web development and creating websites using React.

The first challenge I ran into was creating the design in Figma. I have a harder time being creative when it comes to website designs and I utilized information from the Figma workshop and research about ADHD to help design a website that would both be calming for the user to look at, and provide some energy when approaching tasks.

Next, creating the website was a great challenge. My experience with creating websites is extremely basic, so it proved to be extremely time consuming to the visual aspect of my website to simply appear. Additionally, as I have never used Tailwind before, and only have experience with vanilla CSS, I was quite lost at first regarding the Tailwind documentation. Even after figuring it out more and finally being able to display some basic information, the time I used up trying to learn how to convert my designs in Figma and my written plan was quite costly and I was unable to create a full working product. With that being said, experiencing these obstacles has helped me learn a lot in regards to web development and has allowed me to see which goals I should create to better improve my development and hacker skills so I can finish the creation of Momentum, and create more quicker at future hackathons!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm extremely proud of how I was able to design and start the process of creating a website in Figma over the weekend. It's been a task of mine to start creating websites of my own for over a year now, and to finally start and plan a full website that will provide a positive change for students like me has been something I'm quite proud of.

I'm truly excited to continue my work on Momentum.

What we learned

I learned the basics of how to design using Figma, although my design work can still be improved upon. I also learned how to start a React project and utilize Tailwind to bring my Figma designs to life. This is something that I want to continue to learn in the future as it's a skill I think I'm lacking in.

Additionally, I learned the importance of planning out tasks and having a push to complete them. Researching for Momentum has helped teach me the importance of scheduling tasks, breaking them down, and tracking your progress. I realize now how great it can be to have that push to go outside of your comfort zone to learn and start checking boxes on your to-do list.

What's next for Momentum

Next, I'll be looking to improve upon the base design I've created at Deltahacks9 and fully completing the React website. I'll look to devote more time into improving my skills to ensure that this can become a project that really does help students.

Additionally, some feature improvements I would like to see in Momentum is the ability to rank importance of tasks. I would utilize a precedence graph, in which the weight is set by the length of the task, the time to the deadline, and a user given importance, to better organize how tasks are displayed to the user. This would also allow a recommended focus and better improve how tasks are scheduled and/or rearranged.

Lastly, it would be a fun feature to have some type of currency related to completion of the tasks. Perhaps this is with cool pets you can unlock, coins in which you can buy to improve the visual experience of your task screen, or some other fun way to encourage students to complete tasks. This would be similar to how the mobile app "Forest" uses coins and trees to encourage users to focus. This would be more of a moonshot as it would require a much more in-depth redesign of Momentum.