Planergy — Building a Planner That Adapts to Real Life

What Inspired Me

Planergy was inspired by my lived experience as a neurodivergent founder with fluctuating energy, pain, and communication capacity. Most productivity tools assume that humans are consistent — that we wake up with the same energy, can always talk, and can always push through. That assumption excludes a huge group of people.

During most of this hackathon, I was in a non-verbal flare, which made the need for alternative communication and adaptive systems even more real in the moment. I wanted to build a planner that adapts to humans, not the other way around — one that removes shame from rest and treats changing capacity as normal, not failure.

What I Learned

During this hackathon, I learned:

• How to rapidly prototype and deploy a live product under extreme time constraints
  
• How to collaborate with AI tools like Claude and Cursor as real development partners
  
• How much accessibility improves everyone’s experience, not just disabled users
  
• That building with real users in mind leads to stronger, clearer design decisions
  
• That flexibility and manual overrides (like drag-and-drop) are just as important as automation
  

I also learned that perfection is not necessary to ship a meaningful product — clarity and intention matter more.

How I Built It

Planergy was built as a lightweight web app using:

• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the frontend
  
• Local state and browser storage for task management
  
• A rule-based task estimator for time and energy requirements
  
• A live adaptive scheduler that responds to:
  • Task priority (Important vs Flexible)
  • Energy level (Low, Medium, High)
  • Energy capacity limits
    

I worked closely with Claude and Cursor as AI development partners to scaffold features, debug logic, and rapidly iterate on usability and accessibility.

Key features include:

• Text + voice task input
  
• Non-verbal mode that dynamically changes the interface
  
• Energy-based scheduling
  
• A dopamine menu for low-energy joy and rest
  
• Drag-and-drop rescheduling for real-life flexibility
  
• A Google-style daily timeline view
  

The project was deployed using Vercel.

Challenges I Faced

Some of the biggest challenges included:

• Building while managing pain, fatigue, and being non-verbal for most of the hackathon
  
• Communicating, testing, and debugging while in a flare
  
• Balancing ambitious ideas with the realities of a limited hackathon timeline
  
• Making complex logic (energy, prioritization, scheduling) feel intuitive and not overwhelming
  
• Accepting that not every feature could be perfect in a first version
  
• Recording a demo while completely exhausted 😅
  

Despite these challenges, I shipped a live, working product — which felt like a win on its own.

Final Thoughts

Planergy is not just a planner — it’s an accessibility-first productivity system built on compassion, flexibility, and realism. This project reaffirmed for me that disabled and neurodivergent founders don’t just need to be included in tech — we are actively shaping its future.

Built With

• anthropic
• cursor