The Friction Clock

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  The Dread Meter

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  Micro-Step Generation

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  Log History

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  Momentum Timer

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  The Pre-Momentum timer

Inspiration & What It Does: Honestly, I built this because I was completely drowning. Between prepping for the Digital SAT, dealing with heavy computer science coursework, and keeping up with regular life, my schedule felt impossible. Standard calendar and to-do apps just didn’t work for me—they assume you’re an emotionless robot who can look at a calendar block and magically start working. But when you’re staring down a massive coding assignment or a brutal practice test, the real problem isn't time management; it's the pure anxiety of starting. You look at this huge task, panic, and end up totally paralyzed. I built Friction Clock to fix that exact mental wall. Instead of tracking hours, it tracks your dread. When you log a task, you give it a "dread rating" based on how much you're avoiding it. If the app sees you're panicking, it stops you from worrying about the overwhelming end goal and forces you to just do a simple, two-minute micro-step—like opening a blank file or just reading one problem. Once you take that tiny step, your brain relaxes, you pick up some quick momentum, and you slide into a focused workflow before you even realize you're working.

How We Built It & The Hard Parts: Since the whole point is beating friction, I needed the app itself to feel instant and snappy on my laptop. I used Next.js for the interface and went with Bun as the runtime because it runs code incredibly fast. I also set it up to save data completely locally on the device, meaning it loads instantly without needing a slow internet database. The biggest nightmare during development was actually just wrestling with my Windows terminal. I hit a brutal wall trying to get developer tools to play nice with Windows PowerShell. Spending hours fixing command-line errors, dealing with environment mismatches, and forcing the configurations to cooperate was incredibly frustrating, but it taught me what it actually takes to build reliable software that works natively on my own machine.

What I’m Proud Of, What I Learned, & What's Next: I’m really proud that I built something that solves a genuine, stressful problem that I deal with every single day. This project really taught me that great programming isn't just about writing clever logic; it's about having empathy for how people actually feel when they sit down to work. Moving forward, I want to add local machine learning models to track individual productivity patterns. The goal is to have the app predict when a user is burning out and automatically scale down task complexity before they even realize they're starting to procrastinate. We're turning a bad habit into data, proving you don't need a stressful schedule to get things done—you just need momentum.

Built With

• bun
• next.js
• tailwindcss